ROBERT J. SAWYER

Honor does not have to be defended.

The right things to do are those that keep our violence in abeyance; the wrong things are those that bring it to the fore.

You can't choose the ways in which you'll be tested.

I started wondering why it is that people line up behind charismatic leaders. It's easy to understand the emergence of a figure who's narcissistic and compelling. But why people follow this person mindlessly - that was the hard question to me.

I'm a rationalist. And I can see no evidence for a benevolent and interventionist creator.

The standard model of particle physics says that the universe consists of a very small number of particles, 12, and a very small number of forces, four. If we're correct about those 12 particles and those four forces and understand how they interact, properly, we have the recipe for baking up a universe.

I really strived to give equal weight to the two halves of my genre's name: science and fiction.

It's possible that there is a guiding intelligence in our universe. I don't see a lot of personal evidence for an interventionist-on-an-individual-basis-deity. I have friends who very much do believe in that. But I don't.

The great thing about science fiction is that it transcends national boundaries.

All the things that made us basically nasty, rapacious, competitive as a species are not necessarily hard-coded into whatever passes for the DNA of artificial intelligence.

The general public still thinks that science fiction has nothing to do with their day-to-day lives.

I've had many of my books optioned.

I'm a fiction writer, and fiction is telling the lives of unreal people. But the only way you can learn to do that well is by really understanding the lives of real people.

My mother is an American.

The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is the world's greatest pure physics thinktank, and it's located here in Canada, in Waterloo, Ont.

One gets a bit picky after having the success of something like 'FlashForward!'

The fact we exist merely means we exist. That's all it means.

When you're changing centuries, people get curious about the future.

If you look at the United States, most of the country is pretty much uninhabited.

Fiction is all about vicarious experiences and getting into other people's heads in a way that no other art form lets you.

Psychopathy might lurk behind the mask of sanity.

Traditionally, the science fiction reader has been the 16- to 24-year-old male, especially the male with an interest in technology.

I would love to write more about my hardboiled gumshoe on Mars, Alex Lomax.

Science fiction has always used metaphors and disguises, talking about alien civilizations or the future.

George Orwell's science-fiction classic 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' wasn't a failure because the future it predicted failed to come to pass. Rather, it was a resounding success because it helped us prevent that future.