Robert J. Sawyer Quotes

My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.

My varied listening palette is all-inclusive of all walks of life. No one individual is exempt from the human experience, so it is that intangible that is a universal truth. In that regard, I've had success in encapsulating something cosmic.

I think music is about our internal life. It's part of the way people touch each other. That's very precious to me. And astronomy is, in a sense, the very opposite thing. Instead of looking inwards, you are looking out, to things beyond our grasp.

A feeling for history is almost an essential for writing and appreciating good science fiction, for sensing the connections between the past and future that run through our present.

I'm not well-versed in the science fiction world. I'm hoping that I'll get more opportunities in it because you get to create a new world.

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

I have this theory about science fiction movies in that, when the space race sort of died, a lot of people sort of lost hope.

What irritates me about sci-fi is that it got hijacked by video games and also became so high-concept it was all about ideas and gadgets and technology and nothing about the human experience.

The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do [with great artists]; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.

Our fundamental task as human beings is to seek out connections-to exercise our imaginations.

As man draws nearer to the stars, why should he not also draw nearer to his neighbor?

We are very lucky really, because we can create our own reality, John [Lennon] and me, but we know the important thing is to communicate with other people.

I think if I'm serious about affecting people with music, I have to affect people on a human to human level, not on a grand social idea or political idea, it has to be a human being idea so it has to be what's inside a human being.

Nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all; that is, her scenes must be associated with humane affections, such as are associated with one's native place. She is most significant to a lover. A lover of Nature is preeminently a lover of man. If I have no friend, what is Nature to me? She ceases to be morally significant. . .

It's easy for us to feel separate from other people and from other forms of life, especially if we don't have a reliable connection to our own inner world. Without insight into our internal cycles of pleasure and pain, desires and fears, there is a strong sense of being removed, apart or disconnected. When we do have an understanding of our inner lives, it provides an intuitive opening, even without words, to the ties that exist between ourselves and others.

Man's relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man's relation to the cosmos--to the unknown--which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination.

The universe must not be narrowed down to the limit of our understanding, but our understanding must be stretched and enlarged to take in the image of the universe as it is discovered.

The highest wisdom has but one science-the science of the whole-the science explaining the whole creation and man's place in it.

Science fiction really is the only genre that lets you use your imagination without limitations.

One of the ongoing themes in my work, I hope, and one of the things I believe in, is a sense of human nature, a sense of shared humanity above the cultural layers we place on ourselves [which don't] mean that much compared to the human experience.

The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human.

When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. He is no longer He or She, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition to be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, he is Thou and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light.

The astronomer who catalogues the stars cannot add one atom to the universe; the poet can call an universe from the atom.

I've always loved fantasy. I've always loved sci-fi. It's not like I can list off my favorite sci-fi shows or movies, but I just love being taken into a different world. I'm a huge fan of Steven Spielberg. I'm a huge fan of George Lucas. I've always loved it.

I, a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.