Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Isaac Asimov had writer's block once. It was the worst ten minutes of his life.*

This is the anniversary of the birth of Isaac Asimov, legendary science-fiction author, Vice-President of Mensa International and President of the American Humanist Association.

I recommend this wikiquote page for him, there are some real gems there.
* What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for. -- Yours, Isaac Asimov (1973-09-20)

* Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centures since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly. -- Canadian Atheists Newsletter (1994)

*quote in title attributed to Harlan Ellison.
Tags: -

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I appreciate your post about Asimov. I've especially enjoyed his nonfiction, and he wrote a lot more of it than some might think. He commented once that he'd seen a Slide Rule instruction book of his in the Science Fiction section of a bookstore. Maybe he wasn't a great writer in the literary sense, but he always found something interesting to write about.