"We need to take command of the solar system to gain that wealth, and to escape the sea of paper our government is becoming, and for some decent chance of stopping a Dinosaur Killer asteroid."

"I don't have a strong interest in history."

"I'd repair our education system or replace it with something that works."

"I'd visit the near future, close enough that someone might want to talk to Larry Niven and can figure out the language; distant enough to get me decent medical techniques and a ticket to the Moon."

"I never got good at predicting what millions of people will suddenly decide is rational."

"Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen."

"I do not believe they've run out of surprises."

"In general, I don't know when inspiration will pop up."

"I love superconductors."

"Bruce Sterling is one terrific writer and he's relatively new, but I don't know how long he's been doing it; he probably doesn't need the publicity anymore!"

"In hindsight it may even seem inevitable that a socialist society will starve when it runs out of capitalists."

"Treat your life like something to be sculpted."

"As for AIDS, it's a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it's a quarter; after that it's a childhood disease."

"SF isn't a genre; SF is the matrix in which genres are embedded, and because the SF field is never going in any one direction at any one time, there is hardly a way to cut it off."

"But... watching Steven Barnes taught me to treat my life like an art form."

"I've spent a lot of my life among people brighter than myself."

"We're looking as far ahead as we can, and we don't get penalized for mistakes."

"The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it."

"We should not have assumed that a political space station could be built."

"I'm not predicting; I just love playing with superconductors."

"I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad."

"My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names."

"And every friend I've got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I'd never catch up."