Robert J. Sawyer Quotes

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Robert J. Sawyer

Profession : Writer

Birth : April 29, 1960

Psychopathy might lurk behind the mask of sanity.

Robert J. Sawyer

Science fiction should not be dismissed as escapism. It is a profound vehicle for talking about social and political issues.

Robert J. Sawyer

Everything that I can do to ground the story in reality helps make it harder for people to be dismissive of it.

Robert J. Sawyer

The fact we exist merely means we exist. That's all it means.

Robert J. Sawyer

I think most people are indifferent in their evaluation of what is good or bad.

Robert J. Sawyer

In addition to psychopaths, 'Quantum Night' is also a novel about literally thoughtless people, without inner voices, thoughts in their heads.

Robert J. Sawyer

One of the things that science fiction gets to do is thought experiments about the human condition that would be impractical or unethical to conduct in real life.

Robert J. Sawyer

When I started publishing - my first novel came out in 1990 - there were no options for publishing science fiction in Canada. There were no small presses, and the large presses simply would not touch it at all.

Robert J. Sawyer

My mother is an American.

Robert J. Sawyer

Social progress is a big thing for me. Although science fiction is traditionally concerned with the hard sciences, which is chemistry, physics, and, some might argue, biology, my father was and still is a social scientist at the University of Toronto.

Robert J. Sawyer

Whether it's created in a lab, written by a programmer, or lands on the White House lawn as a visitor from the stars, if it acts like a human being, it is a human being.

Robert J. Sawyer

A writer needs to write, period. He or she can't wait for the muse, shouldn't need peace and quiet, and isn't entitled to perfect conditions or the perfect spot.

Robert J. Sawyer

Writing is transmogrifying, not just for the reader but also for the author; an author becomes someone he or she isn't by living the lives of his or her characters.

Robert J. Sawyer

I'm much more interested in writing about the things that engage and enrage me as an adult rather than in wallowing in childhood sorrows.

Robert J. Sawyer

In the best atheist sense of the word, I feel blessed.

Robert J. Sawyer

I am very pro-science.

Robert J. Sawyer

I'm a rationalist. And I can see no evidence for a benevolent and interventionist creator.

Robert J. Sawyer

I've had many of my books optioned.

Robert J. Sawyer

Once we no longer have the intellectual upper hand, then we quite literally, by definition, cannot outwit our successors. So unless we are absolutely sure that the machines we are building right now are not going to eventually become our new robot overlords, prudence is called for.

Robert J. Sawyer

All the things that made us basically nasty, rapacious, competitive as a species are not necessarily hard-coded into whatever passes for the DNA of artificial intelligence.

Robert J. Sawyer