Pete Young > Pete's Quotes

“I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”
― Anna Quindlen

“A bookstore is one of the only pieces of physical evidence we have that people are still thinking.”
― Jerry Seinfeld

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“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

“One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy”
― William Gibson

“General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.”
― Marvin Minsky

“Two there shall be; no more, no less. One to embody the dark side, the other to crave it.”
― Drew Karpyshyn, Path of Destruction

“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

“Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.”
― Paul Di Filippo, How To Write Science Fiction

“Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.”
― Samuel R. Delany

“Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.”
― Freeman John Dyson, Imagined Worlds

“If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.”
― Bruce Sterling, Burning Chrome

“As sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon said, 90 percent of everything is crap. But science fiction has not been forgiven for its crap. The reason is that science fiction inherently distrusts the 'eternal verities' on which literature graduates base their doctoral dissertations. Literature departments were uncomfortable with that. But things change.”
― David Brin

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.”
― Carl Sagan