Isaac Asimov

If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.

I would also want a God who would not allow a Hell. Infinite torture can only be a punishment for infinite evil, and I don’t believe that infinite evil can be said to exist even in the case of Hitler. Besides, if most human governments are civilized enough to try to eliminate torture and outlaw cruel and unusual punishments, can we expect anything less of an all-merciful God?

I feel that if there were an afterlife, punishment for evil would be reasonable and of a fixed term. And I feel that the longest and worst punishment should be reserved for those who slandered God by inventing Hell.

But all that is just playing. I am firm in my beliefs. I am an atheist and, in my opinion, death is followed by an eternal and dreamless sleep.

Lecturing helps only the students. Research, on the other hand, means government grants, and a portion of the grants is invariably marked for “overhead,” which goes to the school. What it amounts to is that the school chooses research over lecturing every time—money for itself over education for its students.

I have a horror of funerals, not only because I dislike anything unpleasant but also because I detect a tang of hypocrisy to the whole thing. As soon as someone dies, he or she becomes transformed into a miracle of angelic behavior and personality which in life was never true, and everyone puts on an attitude of deep sorrow which, in truth, he or she might not feel.

On the QE2, I devoured caviar every chance I had, while Janet loved the chocolate soufflés. We both reveled in beef Wellington, and a lucky thing too, for, as we found out, as one grows older the doctors take you off any kind of food that tastes good, and it’s just as well we ate it while we could.

I shuddered at the thought of living in Florida, though, a place where six inches is a high elevation.

Happiness is doing it rotten your own way.

The novels I have been writing lately are the kind I wrote in the 1950s. (I have been criticized for this by some critics, but the day I pay attention to critics is the day the sky will fall.)

I resented much modern poetry, because I couldn’t understand it (and, worse yet, there was nothing about it that gave me the urge to try to understand it) and because I despised its freewheeling notions of what a poem should look like.

In writing a science fiction novel, you must invent a futuristic social structure which is complex enough to be interesting in itself apart from the story and which is self-consistent. You must also invent a plot that works only within that social structure. The plot must develop without unduly obscuring the description of the social structure, and the social structure must be described without unduly slowing the plot.

Making a science fiction novel fulfill this double purpose is difficult even for an experienced and talented old hand such as myself. Every other kind of writing is easier than science fiction.

Arthur and I share similar views on science fiction, on science, on social questions, and on politics. I have never had occasion to disagree with him on any of these things, which is a credit to his clear-thinking intelligence.

The trouble is that I am one of the common breed of human being who finds it very easy to strew noble little homilies far and wide but considerably less easy to follow those homilies himself.

Earlier in the book, I mentioned my lack of any real feeling of affection for infants and children. I am not exactly sold on teenagers either.