Sam > Sam's Quotes

“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”
― Philip K. Dick

“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”
― Tom Clancy

“When you have stopped learning you have begun to die.”
― Tom Clancy

“How inappropriate to call this planet "Earth," when it is clearly "Ocean.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“On the surface, I was calm: in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...

Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she had breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn't know how to connect with the people there. I was afraid, for all of my life, right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it's also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

“It was one thing to use computers as a tool, quite another to let them do your thinking for you.”
― Tom Clancy, The Hunt for Red October

“No, look, there's a blue box. It's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. It can go anywhere in time and space and sometimes even where it's meant to go. And when it turns up, there's a bloke in it called The Doctor and there will be stuff wrong and he will do his best to sort it out and he will probably succeed 'cause he's awesome. Now sit down, shut up, and watch 'Blink'.”
― Neil Gaiman

“In my life I have found two things of priceless worth - learning and loving. Nothing else - not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake - can possible have the same lasting value. For when your life is over, if you can say 'I have learned' and 'I have loved,' you will also be able to say 'I have been happy.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, Rama II

“We all know interspecies romance is weird.”
― Tim Burton

“He who controls the spice controls the universe.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Books are keys that open many doors.”
― James Rollins

“Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today, but the core of science fiction -- its essence -- has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all.”
― Isaac Asimov

“You mean old books?"

"Stories written before space travel but about space travel."

"How could there have been stories about space travel before --"

"The writers," Pris said, "made it up.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“It was war, and in war the truth was almost always the first casualty.”
― Vince Flynn, Executive Power

“The only way to do all the things you'd like to do is to read”
― Tom Clancy

“May the Force be with you.”
― george lucas, Star Wars: A New Hope

“Say nothing,” Essada suggested. “It makes you more tolerable.”
― Alan Dean Foster, Star Wars: Splinter of the Mind's Eye

“there are two things men have never been able to satisfy: their curiosity and their greed.”
― George Lucas, Star Wars: A New Hope

“The universe is full of dead people who lived by assumption.”
― Alan Dean Foster, Star Wars: Splinter of the Mind's Eye

“We’re a couple of shooting stars, Biggs, and we’ll never be stopped.”
― George Lucas, Star Wars: A New Hope

“Beware the fury of a patient man”
― Tom Clancy

“You must try to divorce your actions from conscious control. Try not to focus on anything concrete, visually or mentally. You must let your mind drift, drift; only then you can use the force. You have to enter to a state in which you act on what you sense, not on what you think beforehand. You must cease cognition, relax, stop thinking... let yourself drift... free... free...”
― George Lucas, Star Wars: A New Hope

“Nothing is as real as a dream. Responsibilities need not erase it. Duties need not obscure it. Because the dream is within you, no one can take it away.”
― Tom Clancy

“The point of life was to press on, to do the best you can, to make the world a better place.”
― Tom Clancy, Clear and Present Danger

“Being a victim is more palatable than having to recognize the intrinsic contradictions of one's own governing philosophy.”
― Tom Clancy, The Hunt for Red October

“Fix your eyes forward on what you can do, not back on what you cannot change.”
― Tom Clancy

“The Force is with us always!”
― George Lucas, Star Wars: A New Hope