Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

Movies like 'Westworld' used ideas I'd thought of a long time ago.

There's a lot of people I take stuff from, and it's mostly bad guys in movies.

It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.

Robert A. Heinlein has been an idol to me for more than 20 years. He can do no wrong, no matter how much he loves wars and hates pacifists.

My heroes were never scientists. They were Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood, you know, good writers.

As authors evolve and try to trace the precedents that have shaped their work, it sometimes becomes a matter of identifying the shadowy figure in the back row of the mental photograph, or of grabbing at the tail of a memory that's just slipping out the window into thin air.

I truly believe that everything Sci-fi taught me as a child about an efficient and wondrous world will be happening in my lifetime.

When I first started, my novels were set in the far future.

I've been ripping the Rolling Stones off with every song I write in some form or another.

If you look at any creative person's work, you can see bits and pieces of their influences. That's what an artist does.

If there was a direct influence on a song, I never hid it.

Hearing about a visual artist's approach can change the way you think about songwriting.

I'm a big fan of Nora Ephron, who believed everything is copy, and I agree.

Science fiction has been an inspiration to generations of scientists and engineers, and the film series 'Star Wars' is no exception.

Sometimes, I think filmmakers grab too much from real life.

Find a poet whose style you like, emulate that style, then deal with things that you know about - don't waste your time looking for your own style.' I wish I could remember who told me that, because I'd like to congraulate him. I've emulated all the old guys - Tennyson, Alexander Pope.

The Great don't innovate, they fertilize seeds planted by lackeys, they leave to others the inhaling of the flowers whose roots they've manured. A deceptive memory may be the key to their originality.

I don't claim anything of the work. It is his work. I am like a little pencil in his hand. That is all. He does the thinking. He does the writing. The pencil has nothing to do with it.

It just sort of happened. I wrote like what I'd always read and what was in the movies... I'm sure popular music is supposed to be like this.

I'm not particularly inventive. If you left me in а room and told me to write a novel, I wouldn't be able to do it. But if you gave me two years in a public library around the corner, I could. It all comes from sort of mixing the true and the invented. I'm not a fabulist. I'm more of a reporter.

I'm no innovator. If anything I'm a stealer, or borrower. I've stolen or borrowed from more people than you can shake a stick at.

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before. I'm still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that's really the thing that I work on when I make records with people.

My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.

One musician listens to another musician, and you get inspired and then you do your thing, but it's yours.

I had watched an episode of Black Mirror almost exactly a year prior to when I started shooting my episode. I was by myself in New Zealand, and my husband was like, "You have to see this show. It's so incredible."