Top 100 Quotes About Science Writing
#1. Over the last 25 years, since a lot of science writing became accessible to layman, I've become quite a consumer of science. As a child, I wasn't streamed into science, and I regret that now.
John Noble
#2. Today, however, we know that writing, at least science writing, is partly a skill. And skills can be improved. The pain can be reduced.
Michael L. Rosenzweig
#3. No matter how many people try, no matter how many fancy songwriters in Los Angeles try to break it down to a formula ... to an extent, there isn't a science to writing great songs, I suppose.
Lauren Mayberry
#4. I love the Victorian era, and I always have, but I had a leg up on the writing because I was familiar with a lot of the science from the Victorian era. And that led to a massive interest in the science of this time of history.
Gail Carriger
#5. The problem in society is not kids not knowing science. The problem is adults not knowing science. They outnumber kids 5 to 1, they wield power, they write legislation. When you have scientifically illiterate adults, you have undermined the very fabric of what makes a nation wealthy and strong.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#6. The science fiction I write comes from a pretty deep pool of literature, not just from the reflection of other science fiction films, and I think that gives me somewhat deeper roots.
Jon Spaihts
#7. All the definitions people want to put on you in terms of what kind of writer you are come with hidden meanings. If you're writing science fiction, you're writing rocket ships. If you write dystopian fiction, it's inequity where The Man must be fought.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#8. Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.
Paul Di Filippo
#9. Doing an experiment is not more important than writing.
Edwin Boring
#10. [Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!
Terry Pratchett
#11. I started out writing much more science fictiony stuff and writing about science fiction.
Neil Gaiman
#12. Anyone can write a specification, but if nobody implements it, what is it but a particularly dry form of science fiction.
Ian Hickson
#13. There is no greater hiding place for a secret than within the mind of a madman.
Alexander Ferrick
#14. Some things go better than you expected, other things go worse, so I'm ... I think the only sensible thing is just to wait and see and what I'm doing when I'm writing books - I'm not doing science so much anymore.
Freeman Dyson
#15. Buffon said unreservedly, "Genius is simply patience carried to the extreme." To those who asked how he achieved fame he replied: "By spending forty years of my life bent over my writing desk."
Santiago Ramon Y Cajal
#16. The difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.
Adam Savage
#17. You must all know about Bourgain, so I don't have to write his name on the board-for an obvious reason.
Endre Szemeredi
#18. Good science is all about following the data as it shows up and letting yourself be proven wrong, and letting everything change while you're working on it - and I think writing is the same way.
Rebecca Skloot
#19. When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.
Irvine Welsh
#20. The things you're passionate about and interested in, get experience with them by going deep on projects. I would encourage science projects, plays. Pursue science, math, writing, history - the 21st century demands a lot of cross-disciplinary thinking.
Megan Smith
#21. Good science fiction has its roots in good science.
Dan Brown
#22. I love storytelling when the writing spins through me like photons on their way to lighting the world.
Kay Kenyon
#23. Our poets do not write about it; our artists do not try to portray this remarkable thing. I don't know why. Is nobody inspired by our present picture of the universe? The value of science remains unsung by singers ... This is not yet a scientific age ...
Richard P. Feynman
#24. My advice is to write about what you are interested in. If you read science fiction and fantasy, then write in that genre. If you read romance novels, then try writing one.
Michael Scott
#25. No one suggests that writing about science will turn the entire world into a model of judgment and creative thought. It will be enough if they spread the knowledge as widely as possible.
Isaac Asimov
#26. You do bits and you fake anger and you write a bit and you have passion for it. Then you do it too many times and you have to work up the anger ... and I've never had to do that with Dr. Drew Pintsky. Dr. Drew is to medicine what David Blaine is to science.
Doug Stanhope
#27. For those who resist the notion that the mainstream is a genre, we recommend that they browse the shelves of their local bookstore. For if the mainstream is not a genre, then it must necessarily embrace all kinds of writing: romance, adventure, horror, thriller, crime, and, yes, science fiction.
James Patrick Kelly
#28. Writing my own novels in the '90s ... I never imagined that in ten years, science and rationality would require explanation and defense in a world rocked and ruled by religious fervor.
Mary Doria Russell
#29. I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing. I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
Alan Lightman
#30. As a kid I wanted to write science fiction, and I was never without a book. Later I really got into being a scientist and never thought I'd be writing novels.
Daniel H. Wilson
#31. Y'know, we're all wasting our time writing this hack science fiction! You wanta make real money, you gotta start a religion!
L. Ron Hubbard
#32. So research is a terribly imperfect science, and you learn an awful lot more after you've published a book, because people keep writing to you and saying, 'Oh, gosh, I was related to such and such a character and I have a letter in my possession.'
Simon Winchester
#33. Eliot admitted later on that science-fiction writers couldn't write for sour apples, but he declared that it didn't matter. He said they were poets just the same, since they were more sensitive to important changes than anybody who was writing well.
Kurt Vonnegut
#34. When you write something new about science, other scientists may not like it but they pay attention because it is subject to proof. When you write something new about art, it is subject only to the reader's discomfort, and will probably be rejected.
Walter Darby Bannard
#35. While I was in high school, I discovered and began writing science fiction.
Laurence Yep
#36. Writing is a master craft in the finest art,
the loneliest profession in the most social science,
the most influential medium in the toughest industry,
yet is the most under-rated profession.
Grant McLachlan
#37. Often during writing, I am compelled by OCD to delete and rewrite a word or sentence over and over again.
Abhijit Naskar
#38. I didn't have any writer friends in college. I was a computer science major, but I was writing a lot, probably more than anybody I knew. I started to submit novels to New York when I was a freshman in college.
Watt Key
#39. Just because science can't in practice explain things like the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet, that doesn't mean that religion can. It's a simple and logical fallacy to say, 'If science can't do something therefore religion can.'
Richard Dawkins
#40. I sort of was good at writing essays. I was never very good at mathematics, and I was never very good at algebra. I loved science, but I wasn't sure of it.
Diane Cilento
#41. [I can] scarcely write upon mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of the science.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#42. The best ending ever, for a science fiction book - or any novel, now that I think about it - was in Rendezvous With Rama. You know that you're at the end of the book and yet, there is no resolution. Then he hits you with those last six words. Better yet, the power is in the very last word. Wow!
John Gaver
#43. When I was a kid, I figured I would be a physicist when I grew up, and then I would write science fiction on the side. The physicist thing didn't pan out, but writing science fiction on the side did.
Ted Chiang
#44. I never really saw myself as writing science fiction anyway.
Nigel Kneale
#45. I have been doodling since childhood. I have a passion for illustrating but cannot paint or colour for that matter. I illustrate what I am trying to communicate through my writing. My images are like drawings in a science text book.
Devdutt Pattanaik
#47. Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.
Octavia E. Butler
#48. To write a novel is to dream while awake, then express the dream to the reader in an absorbing way. The road leading from the writer's inner world to the readers' is paved with prose.
Alan Joshua
#49. Good writing isn't a science. It's an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.
David Foster Wallace
#50. I have to do more close research and fact checking for the science fiction. This is not however to say that writing good fantasy does not involve doing good research.
Sarah Zettel
#51. When a writer is already stretching the bounds of reality by writing within a science fiction or fantasy setting, that writer must realize that excessive coincidence makes the fictional reality the writer is creating less 'real.'
Jane Lindskold
#52. My potential salvation ... must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open our eyes with "aha"
while direct, abstract, learned assaults upon generalities usually glaze them over.
Stephen Jay Gould
#53. I'd studied 16th century science and magic. I thought it was strange that people were interested in the same kinds of things my research was about. The more I thought about it, the more intriguing it became and pretty soon I was writing a novel about a reluctant witch and a 1500-year-old vampire.
Deborah Harkness
#54. I cannot say how strongly I object to people using other people's writing as research. Research is non-fiction, especially for horror, fantasy, science fiction. Do not take your research from other people's fiction. Just don't.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#56. When you talk with people, one of the arguments they'll throw back at you is that the climate has always changed, and that is absolutely right. It's the rate of change that is the problem right now. It's changing so quickly that it exceeds the adaptive capacity of some species.
Michael Crimmins
#57. I do not want to write beyond this point, because those days when I studied relentlessly are nostalgic to me; and on the other hand, I am sad when I think how I have become increasingly preoccupied with matters other than study.
Hideki Yukawa
#58. O MY WIFE-who made the writing of my previous book a pleasure and writing of the present one a necessity.
Herbert C. Brown
#59. To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.
(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)
Dorothy L. Sayers
#60. True writing is not an art or science but it's an anthem to preach own soul
Kunal Jajal
#61. A moment later the scowling face of Admiral Jellico appeared on the screen. He looked as ill-humored as ever. Privately, Calhoun felt that somebody should send an away team into Jellico's ass, to determine just what had crawled up there and died years ago.
Peter David
#62. Brevity in writing is the best insurance for its perusal.
Rudolf Virchow
#64. There can be a science to joke writing, there are certainly rules and patterns that can be followed, but I think most of the best comedy goes beyond the rules.
Robin Ince
#65. In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.
Ben Bova
#66. Daniel, I was asked of a budding author, how do you know if your story is on track? My answer: I start by knowing my intention, my target. Then, with purpose, I write the scene that unfolds before me, as faithfully as is human. - Daniel LaMonte
Daniel LaMonte
#67. Science is wonderful, science is important, and so are children, so are young people, and so what could be better than to write a science book for young people?
Richard Dawkins
#68. Around the lab I heard that publicity was measured in an absolute unit, the "kan". That unit was too large for ordinary application and a practical unit one one-thousandth of the size served in its place, the "millikan".
Luis W. Alvarez
#69. If we can't write diversity into sci-fi, then what's the point? You don't create new worlds to give them all the same limits of the old ones.
Jane Espenson
#70. I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.
Octavia E. Butler
#71. In short, I do not write for mathematicians, nor as a mathematician, but as an economist wishing to convince other economists that their science can only be satisfactorily treated on an explicitly mathematical basis.
William Stanley Jevons
#72. I go on writing in both respectable and despised genres because I respect them all, rejoice in their differences, and reject only the prejudice and ignorance that dismisses any book, unread, as not worth reading."
"On Despising Genres," essay
Ursula K. Le Guin
#73. We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of 'proving theorems.' Is a writer's job mainly that of 'writing sentences?
Gian-Carlo Rota
#74. Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.
Ted Chiang
#75. I started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to write.
James Rollins
#76. I see myself as a novelist, period. I mean, the material I work with is what is classified as science fiction and fantasy, and I really don't think about these things when I'm writing. I'm just thinking about telling a story and developing my characters.
Roger Zelazny
#77. I had a few people ask me if I might one day write my own autobiography. I just told them, 'It's already being written; through my books.
T.S. Wieland
#78. I would rather never make a penny on book sales and know that many had derived some fair pleasure from my writing, than to know that very few had ever taken a chance on my work. I certainly won't last forever, but I'd love to think that my imagination will continue to surface in the minds of others.
Eric Diehl
#79. Science fiction is a field of writing where, month after month, every printed word implies to hundreds of thousands of people: 'There is change. Look, today's fantastic story is tomorrow's fact.
A.E. Van Vogt
#80. As a woman writing SF, I felt I had to think and write like a man in order to be taken seriously.
Heidi Ruby Miller
#81. I'm writing a review of three books on feminism and science, and it's about social constructionism. So I would say I'm a social constructionist, whatever that means.
Clifford Geertz
#82. You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.
L. Ron Hubbard
#83. I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.
Octavia Butler
#84. Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.
Michael Chabon
#85. Even when I'm writing about shape shifters and magical lands, I'm looking into my own heart.
Kay Kenyon
#86. When I first started drawing the earliest incarnation of 'Optic Nerve,' I hadn't even been on a date; I hadn't had a romantic relationship of any kind yet, so in a way, I was almost writing science fiction.
Adrian Tomine
#87. Theorists write all the popular books on science: Heinz Pagels, Frank Wilczek, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, et al. And why not? They have all that spare time.
Leon M. Lederman
#88. Wonder is very important, because if we never wondered, we would never get to the point of asking questions. Yet wonder may lead people to write poetry or to paint pictures or to pray, as well as to ask the kinds of questions about the world and themselves that can be answered by science.
Margaret Mead
#89. But what is hard to understand is why the math and science gap launched a massive movement on behalf of girls, and yet a much larger gap in reading, writing, and school engagement created no comparable effort for boys.
Christina Hoff Sommers
#90. It's very strange writing science fiction in a world that moves as fast as ours does.
Daniel Keys Moran
#91. Unfortunately, in many cases, people who write science fiction violate the laws of nature, not because they want to make a point, but because they don't know what the laws of nature are.
Isaac Asimov
#92. Rod Clark has one of the most unique voices I have ever encountered. I still quote some of his political insights years later. To have him write political science fiction is both appropriate and intriguing.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
#93. The emotional tone or affect of the tale should be hot and engaged, not remote and dispassionate.
Paul Di Filippo
#94. I am putting together a secular bible. My Genesis is when the apple falls on Newton's head.
A.C. Grayling
#95. I started submitting stories for publication when I was about 15, but it was many years before I sold anything. I don't make my living writing science fiction, so in that sense, I'm still not a pro.
Ted Chiang
#96. That was asking a lot of my readers, I realized, but I was trying to write the novel I would most enjoy decoding.
Paul Di Filippo
#97. My dad was Chinese-American and very conservative when it came to his family's futures. He said if I wanted to have a secure job, I should go into science. So I did what Dad said and went to medical school, but the writing bug never left me.
Tess Gerritsen
#98. I grew up reading comic books, pulp books, mystery and science fiction and fantasy. I'm a geek; I make no pretensions otherwise. It's the stuff that I love writing about. I like creating worlds.
David S.Goyer
#99. To present a scientific subject in an attractive and stimulating manner is an artistic task, similar to that of a novelist or even a dramatic writer. The same holds for writing textbooks.
Max Born
#100. If I can keep writing just one good page a day, I will have 15 published novels in my expected lifetime. Tick, tick, tick...
Barry James Hickey
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