Issac Asimov Quotations

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right.

Night was a wonderful time in Brooklyn in the 1930s. Air conditioning was unknown except in movie houses, and so was television. There was nothing to keep one in the house. Furthermore, few people owned automobiles, so there was nothing to carry one away. That left the streets and the stoops. The very fullness served as an inhibition to crime.

I have been told that a young would-be composer wrote to Mozart asking advice as to how to compose a symphony. Mozart responded that a symphony was a complex and demanding form and that it would be better to start with something simpler. The young man protested, 'But Herr Mozart, you wrote symphonies when you were younger than I am now.' And Mozart replied, 'I never asked how.'

From my close observation of writers...they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

It is a curious fact that innumerable readers have asked me if I wrote this story. They seem never to remember the title of the story or (for sure) the author, except for the vague thought it might be me. But, of course, they never forget the story itself, especially the ending. The idea seems to drown out everything else - and I'm satisfied that it should.

True literacy is becoming an arcane art and the United States is steadily dumbing down.

When asked what he would do if he only had six months to live: Type faster.

Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

Though science can cause problems, it is not by ignorance that we will solve them.

To insult someone we call him "bestial." For deliberate cruelty and nature, "human" might be the greater insult.

I sit here and think, with more than a little astonishment, that I have been writing and publishing Science Fiction now for just three-eighths of a century. This isn't bad for someone who only admits to being in his late youth- or a little over thirty, if pinned down.

A poor idea well written is more likely to be accepted than a good idea poorly written

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny'

Then Priss arrived, dragging a volume of colorlessness in with him, a drabness that was unaffected by the noise and the absolute splendor (no other word would describe it - or else it was the two martinis glowing inside me) that filled the room

In 1936, I first wrote science fiction. It was a long-winded attempt at writing an endless novel...which died. I remember one sentence, "Whole forests stood sere and brown in midsummer".

How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!