In a closed society where everybody's guilty the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves the only final sin is stupidity.

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees then names the streets after them.

The Viennese wash everything. Where else in the world does the government hire public servants to wash public telephone booths and the glass over traffic lights? Every time I see someone doing these things I smile like a child.

When Whitney Houston died I felt great sadness. My sadness of course was about our collective loss - when you listened to this nightingale sing your body would drop into a chair your head would tilt up a small smile would creep across your face and inside you knew that there was a higher power somewhere: gifted beautiful spiritual.

When trying to remember my share in the glow of the eternal present in the smile of God I return to my childhood too for that is where the most significant discoveries turn up.

Wrinkles will only go where the smiles have been.

It may be far in the future but there's some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.

Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic Chinese Japanese Korean or Russian combined.

One hardly knows where in the history of science to look for an important movement that had its effective start in so pure and simple an accident as that which led to the building of the great Washington telescope and went on to the discovery of the satellites of Mars.

I really like science because it seems to be that place where you get the big picture everything connects.

I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now the novelist must take a good hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

But the imposition of morality onto science - where it does not belong - has become rampant in recent years.

Science fiction has a way of letting you talk about where we are in the world and letting you be a bit of a pop philosopher without being didactic.

Except in very narrow cases where there's breakthrough science that needs patent production worrying about competitors is a waste of time. If you can't out iterate someone who is trying to copy you you're toast anyway.

Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere.

We have found that where science has progressed the farthest the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind put into nature.

Before I was reading science fiction I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me in terms of my development - an insight came from that book.

I've always felt that the human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting more exotic more wild and more heroic adventures than the machine-supremacy approach where information is the highest goal.

'Rocket Science' is really where I fell in love with filmmaking I think 'Camp' was incredible but it was so bizarre and I was trying to find my footing in this world where you don't have an audience for immediate validation.

I'd love to do a movie where the monster is human where the issue is not otherworldly or horror or science fiction.

The world has changed - through technology through wine-making techniques the quality of wine is greater than it's ever been. Whereas ten fifteen years ago it was very easy to find lots of bad wine it's kind of hard now. The technology the science - it's like are you kidding? We're in the golden years of wine!

We're as clever as we think we are but we'll be a lot cleverer when we learn to use not just one brain but to pool huge numbers of brains. We're at a level technologically where we can share information and think collectively about our problems. We do it in science all the time - there's no reason why we can't do it in other endeavors.

Science is global. Einstein's equation E=mc2 has to reach everywhere. Science is a beautiful gift to humanity we should not distort it. Science does not differentiate between multiple races.

From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It's not a miracle we just decided to go.