Henry Petroski Quotes

What we usually consider as impossible are simply engineering problems... there's no law of physics preventing them.

If you think the technology is infeasible, you don't worry about what it might do and what its potential is.

Machines built by human beings they will function correctly if we provide them with a very specific environment. But if that environment is changed, they won't function at all.

I'm in deep in everything, every moment of the day. I create the systems and oversee every aspect of the execution. Every mark on a sculpture and every brush-stroke on a painting is in a controlled situation, exactly as they'd be if I'd have done them myself.

Science fiction was rocket-mad for about 40 years until aerospace hit a brick wall about 1970. I would not write off space colonisation or exploration completely, but we are profoundly ill adapted for going boldly into outer space.

As an engineer, I tended to maintain my own equipment along with developing the processes for it.

The term 'cyberutopian' tends to be used only in the context of critique. Calling someone a cyberutopian implies that he or she has an unrealistic and naively overinflated sense of what technology makes possible and an insufficient understanding of the forces that govern societies.

I love near-term sci-fi. I especially love right-now sci-fi: stuff that happens in current time but incorporates a scientific breakthrough that is currently being explored.

I am living in the world that I always dreamed of. I am still not living in a world where you can teleport matter from one place to another just by atoms. We haven't reached there yet.

Whatever science fiction movies we watch now, we can make the technology real in two days. What we can do is not important. What we should do is more important.

I tend not to read or watch Science Fiction, particularly not comedy Science Fiction. The point is that if it's less good than what I do, there's no point in reading it, if it's better than what I do it makes me depressed

Most Muggles lived in a world defined by the limits of what you could do with cars and telephones. Even though Muggle physics explicitly permitted possibilities like molecular nanotechnology or the Penrose process for extracting energy from black holes, most people filed that away in the same section of their brain that stored fairy tales and history books, well away from their personal realities: Long ago and far away, ever so long ago.

We're living on the Planet of the Apes. Is that funny or serious?

To be a science fiction writer you must be interested in the future and you must feel that the future will be different and hopefully better than the present. Although I know that most - that many science fiction writings have been anti-utopias. And the reason for that is that it's much easier and more exciting to write about a really nasty future than a - placid, peaceful one.

She didn't strike me as a "crossword in ink" kind of girl

The better you get, the more your legacy shines. I always just try to go hard. If you don't want do it for real, don't do it at all.

Science fiction does not attempt to predict. It extrapolates. It just says, "What if?" not what will be? Because you can never predict what will happen, particularly in politics and economics. You can to some extent predict in the technological sphere - flying, space travel, but even there we missed badly on some things, like computers. No one imagined the incredible impact of computers, even though robot brains of various kinds but the idea that one day every house would have a computer in every room and that one day we'd have computers built into our clothing, nobody ever thought of that.

Scientists are embarrassed by science fiction; they want to distance themselves as much as possible. ... I think there's nothing to be ashamed of [and that] we should take science fiction seriously.

I've always liked sci-fi/fantasy films. I've never really followed any sci-fi television shows though. I wouldn't consider myself a fan. When asked, I think I say the Matrix is my favorite movie.

Who shall make me perfect? I am perfect already.

It's tremendously hard work. Yes, I love arranging the words and having them fall on the ear the right way and you know you're not quite there and you're redoing it and redoing it and there's a wonderful thrill to it. But it is hard.

The hardest thing [for me] is to 'just' agree, and that is what sparks creativity, the feeling that something can be better, the feeling that something's missing, the feeling that something's needed.

It was an excess of fantasy that killed the old United States, the whole Mickey Mouse and Marilyn thing, the most brilliant technologies devoted to trivia like instant cameras and space spectaculars that should have stayed in the pages of Science Fiction . . . some of the last Presidents of the U.S.A. seemed to have been recruited straight from Disneyland.

Sometimes people freak out when you shoot 40 takes of something. They start looking at you like, "What did I do wrong?", and its like "No. It's not wrong. It's just that we are going to try something different."

When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it's finished. A certain point comes at which you can't do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.