We have grown in numbers to the point where our presence is perceptibly disabling the planet like a disease. As in human diseases there are four possible outcomes: destruction of the invading disease organisms; chronic infection; destruction of the host; or symbiosis – a lasting relationship of mutual benefit to the host and invader.

— From: James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth.

I saw a lovely analogy recently. Somebody said that writers are like otters. And otters are really hard to train. Dolphins are easy to train. They do a trick, you give them a fish, they do the trick again, you give them a fish. They will keep doing that trick until the end of time. Otters, if they do a trick and you give them a fish, the next time they’ll do a better trick or a different trick because they’d already done that one. And writers tend to be otters. Most of us get pretty bored doing the same trick. We’ve done it, so let’s do something different.

— By: Neil Gaiman, in Interview: Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon, by Lev Grossman, Sunday, September 25, 2005.

Americans are considered crazy anywhere in the world.
They will usually concede a basis for the accusation but point to California as the focus of the infection. Californians stoutly maintain that their bad reputation is derived solely from the acts of the inhabitants of Los Angeles County. Angelenos will, when pressed, admit the charge but explain hastily, “It’s Hollywood. It’s not our fault — we didn’t ask for it; Hollywood just grew.”
The people in Hollywood don’t care; they glory in it. If you are interested, they will drive you up Laurel Canyon “–where we keep the violent cases.” The Canyonites — the brown-legged women, the trunks-clad men constantly busy building and rebuilding their slap-happy unfinished houses — regard with faint contempt the dull creatures who live down in the flats, and treasure in their hearts the secret knowledge that they, and only they, know how to live.
Lookout Mountain Avenue is the name of a side canyon which twists up from Laurel Canyon. The other Canyonites don’t like to have it mentioned; after all, one must draw the line somewhere!

— From: Robert Heinlein, And He Built A Crooked House, first published in Astounding Science Fiction, February 1941, reprinted in The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein.

I’ve got Google up all the time. It gives you this veneer of command of the facts which you do not, in point of fact, have. It’s extremely useful for novelists but somewhat dangerous if you’re pretending to be a brain surgeon. (…)
I’ve been very interested in futuristic prognostications written in the 19th century. They’re always off. No one can ever make it as banal as it is. If you’re writing about the future, it’s hard to write about things that will be omnipresent and boring and explain to your readers that they are novelties to you but boring to your characters. (…)
The best way to have a really great idea is to have a thousand ideas. The guy who has the thousand ideas will be valorized for idea 837 and for idea 732, but those were never the ones he treasured. (…)
Social movements hate heretics far more than they hate pagans. Pagans who have never heard the gospel – you should clothe them. You should send out missionaries. They just don’t know. It’s the people who do know, who have the opposite idea, whom you hate.

— From: Cybergreen: Bruce Sterling On Media, Design, Fiction, And The Future, Interviewed by Mike Godwin, January 2004.

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
(…)
I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.
(…)
Am I the only one who finds the expression “it turns out” to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It’s great. It’s hugely better than its predecessors “I read somewhere that…” or the craven “they say that…” because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it is research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight. Anyway, where was I?
(…)
The following morning the weather was so foul it hardly deserved the name, and Dirk decided to call it Stanley instead.
(…)
“If the telly is to be believed, all cabbies ever do,” continued the cabbie, “is follow other cabbies. (…) Which leaves me in a very strange position, as being the one cabbie that never gets asked to follow another cabbie. Which leads me to the unmistakable conclusion that i must be the cabbie all the other cabbies are following.
(…)
You know what a learning experience is? A learning experience is one of those things that says, “you know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.”

— From: Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt : Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

Once you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very useful device for enabling you to know that it is.

— From: Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Be careful when you wrestle with monsters, lest you thereby become one. For, if you stare long into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil : Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, aphorism 146.