Robert J. Sawyer Quotes

One of my favorites is "Time and Again" by Jack Finney. It takes place in Manhattan and goes back and forth between 1882 and the 1950s. It's really a cult book.

This show [Timeless] is absolutely epic. I simply can't believe the production value for the episodes. Each episode is creating a new world. I just can't think of another television show that trumps the Hindenburg to the 1970s week to week.

I mean, the first 'Back to the Future' is kind of a perfect script, I think, in terms of handling time travel the best. It depends on your definition. To me, that means it effectively uses it in the story.

It was quite a surprise when I realized that with a single wormhole you could have time hook up towards the future or towards the past and that you can actually manipulate the wormhole and change how time hooked up.

The energy necessary to create a wormhole or to wrap time into nuts is incredible. It's not for us. It's maybe for our descendants who have mastered the energy of this technology. So if one day, somebody knocks on your door and claims to be your great great great great granddaughter, don't slam the door.

I don't feel proprietorial about the problems of philosophy. History has taught us that many philosophical issues can grow up, leave home and live elsewhere.

Whether you can go back in time is held in the grip of the law of quantum gravity.

Time travel offends our sense of cause and effect - but maybe the universe doesn't insist on cause and effect.

To start your life as a character of 120 years when you are in your late thirties, and then go back in time about 20 years later to play the same character who is your own age then, its very complicated, but very interesting.

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.

I like to say 'Reign' is the '24' of the pre-Renaissance. I think we're going to take a lot of liberties with history, as well as extend it over a longer period of time.

The one thing humans can't control is time, but what if one has the power to do so is the core theme of '24.'

I know, on 'Rick and Morty,' we had the time where they unfreeze time, and they're in trouble because of it. The time starts splitting. That episode, we got a little too focused on 'how,' the hows and the science behind it, and oh my God, it was - it was spiraling us for sure.

We are astonished at thought, but sensation is equally wonderful.

To know the future absolutely it to be trapped into that future absolutely. It collapses time. Present becomes future.

There is a little bit of hubris to want to change the past. It implies that you know better - that things didn't happen the way that they were supposed to.

Nietzsche's ideas and plans: for example, the idea of giving up the whole wretched academic world to form a secular monastic community.

Fuzzy thinking is, after all, just one step above not thinking at all. But to take the ideas of serious transformational thinkers and philosophers and throw the "new age" label at them is also abhorrent.

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

The cool thing about Watchmen is it has this really complicated question that it asks, which is: who polices the police or who governs the government? Who does God pray to? Those are pretty deep questions but also pretty fun questions. Kind of exciting. It tries to subvert the superhero genre by giving you these big questions, moral questions. Why do you think you're on a fun ride? Suddenly you're like how am I supposed to feel about that?

When you cut into the present the future leaks out.

After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense.

Ethics occupies a central place in philosophy because it is concerned with sin, with the origin of good and evil and with moral valuations. And since these problems have a universal significance, the sphere of ethics is wider than is generally supposed. It deals with meaning and value and its province is the world in which the distinction between good and evil is drawn, evaluations are made and meaning is sought.

The past is a kind of future that has already happened.

I always like worlds where you could be in several different time periods.