Quotes by Robert J. Sawyer

“Kayla replied, And we---or the p-zeds, at any rate---copy indiscriminately, without reflection. And if the person theyre coyping is a psychopath, then their behavior ends up being de facto psychopa...”

“Naturally, one does not normally discuss plans to commit murder with the intended victim.”

“I get tired of hearing some science-fiction fans saying that characterization isn't important in SF. In point of fact, I think it's probably more important in SF than in mainstream fiction. After a...”

“There is no indisputable proof for the big bang," said Hollus. "And there is none for evolution. And yet you accept those. Why hold the question of whether there is a creator to a higher standard?”

“It is either coincidence piled on top of coincidence," said Hollus, "or it is deliberate design.”

“No one disputes that seeming order can come out of the application of simple rules. But who wrote the rules?”

“That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunchest creationist. But that it can transform one species into another that, in fact, has never bee...”

“Gone. and it was completely. Everyone I'd every known, every place I'd ever been. My Mother. My father. Rebecca. Out of site. Out of mind.”

“If theft is advantageous to everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn't the ...”

“Not darkness, for that implies an understanding of light. Not silence, for that suggests a familiarity with sound. Not loneliness, for that requires knowledge of others. But still, faintly, so tenu...”

“The sky above the island was the color of television, tuned to a dead channelwhich is to say it was a bright, cheery blue.”

“All right, he said. Since you asked, Webmind is an emergent quantum-computational system based on a stable null-sigma condensate that resists decoherence thanks to constructive feedback loops. He t...”

“He had a collection of science-fiction films on DVD and Blu-ray discs, and although he said hed seen most of them before, Caitlin was surprised to discover how many of the cases were still shrink-w...”

“And Wolfram knows about cellular automata? Oh, my goodness, yes, said Anna. He wrote a book you could kill a man withtwelve hundred pagescalled A New Kind of Science. Its all about them. We should ...”

“Mr. Lockerymy biology teachersays if dinosaurs were magically brought forward in time today, wed have nothing to worry about. Dogs, wolves, and bears would make short work of tyrannosaurs. She nodd...”

“George Orwell's science-fiction classic 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' wasn't a failure because the future it predicted failed to come to pass. Rather, it was a resounding success because it helped us prev...”

“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.”

“It's possible that there is a guiding intelligence in our universe. I don't see a lot of personal evidence for an interventionist-on-an-individual-basis-deity. I have friends who very much do belie...”

“You can't be a 21st-century science fiction writer writing about Mars without doing tips of the hat to Edgar Rice Burroughs, to Ray Bradbury, to H.G. Wells, to the guys who first put it in the publ...”

“Regrettably, with '2001' having a title that had a year in it, science fiction essentially set itself up in the public's imagination as saying, 'Here's what you get if you wait to that year.' Well,...”