Isaac Asimov Quotes

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.

I want to do something splendid… Something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead… I think I shall write books.

If any of my plays outlive me or get on library book shelves and somehow stay read, all of a sudden it's a testament to "that's part of our culture, that's part of our history."

Ray Bradbury was not ahead of his time. He was perfectly of his time, and more than that: he created his time and left his mark on the time that followed.

I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances - from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime.

I can't write a book commensurate with Shakespeare, but I can write a book by me.

I'll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette.

Whenever you write a character, you want to make them themselves, you want to make them unique. You don't want fifty characters in your book and they all pretty much act and think the same except they have different colored hair.

It is said, no man can write but one book; and if a man have a defect, it is apt to leave its impression on all his performances.

O thou who art able to write a book which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name city-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name conqueror or city-burner.

Once you finish a book, it doesn't belong to you anymore. You're giving it to other people. If something in what a writer writes can excite the imagination and the feelings of the reader, then that reader carries it around forever. Nothing is more vivid than good fiction.

I thought, if I write a book that is not a retelling of Pride and Prejudice, it's not going to mean that I will not get any criticism. I might as well write the book that I want to write.

I'm happy to be a woman but much of it was learned over the course of life. Really thudded into me. You learn it. It's a kind of mastery and artistry. The deeper person underneath the scent of Diptyque Philosykos or whatever is much less gendered. Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I'm as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.

I refuse to censor myself and kids will find their own way to my books and to all of the books that matter to them. As I write more honestly more kids will make their way toward me. And in subverting their repressive parents kids will learn the value of subverting the repressive nature of all authority figures.

One is always changing. I don't want to write the same book and I couldn't, because I'm a different person.

I will write on the pages of history what I want them to say. I will be myself. I will speak my own name.

There’s no grand plan. All I know is that I write the books I want to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me.

I'd like to be remembered not only for my body of work but also for specific novels. Ideally, I want to be remembered in the same way as Stephen King, who defined and exemplified excellence in the horror genre in the late 20th and early 21st century.

You really write the books you want to write. You can't take into consideration anything that anybody has said about you in the past, or what they'll say about you in the future.

There will come a time when nobody reads my books and no one remembers who I was. And in the meantime, I'll do it my way.

Nearly all the writing of our time is likely to disappear in a hundred years. Certainly most readers - and nearly all critics - feel that [Kurt] Vonnegut started to repeat himself, to grow increasingly self-indulgent and meandering, and to sometimes just blather in his later work. But his books up to "Slaughterhouse-Five" do possess a distinctiveness that will insure some kind of permanence, if only in the history of the 1960s and of science fiction.

The only thing I want is something I can't have; and that is to know if, 100 years from now, people will still buy my books.

To write? Because all this is going to vanish. The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing, we would be naked on earth.

In the last volume of In Search of Lost Time, Proust compares himself to Scheherazade: he says he has finally understood the nature of the book he has to write, just at the moment when his advancing years and declining health have made him doubt that he's going to live long enough to write it. So he has to write against death like Scheherazade.

I'll leave it to other people to evaluate the legacy of my book, but I'm very moved when musicians tell me that they've been inspired by my book.