Quotessence
Home / Authors / Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

Film writer

Filter quotes by topic

AllMenSpaceScienceMayIfsUniverseScience FictionWorldEarthLongMindTechnologyThinkingStarsWellsHas BeensKnowsPeopleReligionStills

Famous Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

“Bowman was aware of some changes in his behavior patterns; it would have been absurd to expect anything else in the circumstances. He could no longer tolerate silence; except when he was sleeping, or talking over the circuit to Earth, he kept the ship's sound system running at almost painful loudness. / At first, needing the companionship of the human voice, he had listened to classical plays--especially the works of Shaw, Ibsen, and Shakespeare--or poetry readings from Discovery's enormous library of recorded sounds. The problems they dealt with, however, seemed so remote, or so easily resolved with a little common sense, that after a while he lost patience with them. / So he switched to opera--usually in Italian or German, so that he was not distracted even by the minimal intellectual content that most operas contained. This phase lasted for two weeks before he realized that the sound of all these superbly trained voices was only exacerbating his loneliness. But what finally ended this cycle was Verdi's Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The "Dies Irae," roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely shattered; and when the trumpets of Doomsday echoed from the heavens, he could endure no more. / Thereafter, he played only instrumental music. He started with the romantic composers, but shed them one by one as their emotional outpourings became too oppressive. Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, lasted a few weeks, Beethoven rather longer. He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, occasionally ornamented with Mozart. / And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years.”

SpaceMusicScience Fiction
Book:2001: A Space Odyssey
Create image

“Sometimes, during the lonely hours on the control deck, Bowman would listen to this radiation. He would turn up the gain until the room filled with a crackling, hissing roar; out of this background, at irregular intervals, emerged brief whistles and peeps like the cries of demented birds. It was an eerie sound, for it had nothing to do with Man; it was as lonely and meaningless as the murmur of waves on a beach, or the distant crash of thunder beyond the horizon.”

ScienceSoundSpaceScience FictionNoiseSci FiRadiationJupiter2001
Author:Arthur C. Clarke
Create image

“(...)Through the ship's telescopes, he had watched the death of the solar system. With his own eyes, he had seen the volcanoes of Mars erupt for the first time in a billion years; Venus briefly naked as her atmosphere was blasted into space before she herself was consumed; the gas giants exploding into incandescent fireballs. But these were empty, meaningless spectacles compared with the tragedy of Earth. That, too, he had watched through the lenses of cameras that had survived a few minutes longer than the devoted men who had sacrificed the last moments of their lives to set them up. He had seen ... ... the Great Pyramid, glowing dully red before it slumped into a puddle of molten stone ... ... the floor of the Atlantic, baked rock-hard in seconds, before it was submerged again, by the lava gushing from the volcanoes of the Mid-ocean Rift... ... the Moon rising above the flaming forests of Brazil and now itself shining almost as brilliantly as had the Sun, on its last setting, only minutes before ... ... the continent of Antarctica emerging briefly after its long burial, as the kilometres of ancient ice were burned away ... ... the mighty central span of the Gibraltar Bridge, melting even as it slumped downward through the burning air ... In that last century the Earth was haunted with ghosts - not of the dead, but of those who now could never be born. For five hundred years the birthrate had been held at a level that would reduce the human population to a few millions when the end finally came. Whole cities - even countries - had been deserted as mankind huddled together for History's closing act.”

Science FictionArthurEnd Of DaysClarkeBeauty DestroyedBeauty In Destruction
Author:Arthur C. Clarke
Create image

“Much blood has also been spilled on the carpet in attempts to distinguish between science fiction and fantasy. I have suggested an operational definition: science fiction is something that COULD happen - but usually you wouldn't want it to. Fantasy is something that COULDN'T happen - though often you only wish that it could.”

WantHappensWishFictionFantasyBloodScience FictionDefinitionsCarpetScience Fiction And Fantasy
Book:The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke: History Lesson
Create image

“Please help keep the world clean: others may wish to use it. Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence. The only place success comes before work is a dictionary Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.”

WorldShouldMayHelpingStoriesUseWishFictionPoliticianPleaseLogicMethodScience FictionCleanConclusionDictionaryDetectivesSystematicDetective StoriesWrong Conclusion
Author:Arthur C. Clarke
Create image

“Science fiction does not attempt to predict. It extrapolates. It just says, "What if?" not what will be? Because you can never predict what will happen, particularly in politics and economics. You can to some extent predict in the technological sphere - flying, space travel, but even there we missed badly on some things, like computers. No one imagined the incredible impact of computers, even though robot brains of various kinds but the idea that one day every house would have a computer in every room and that one day we'd have computers built into our clothing, nobody ever thought of that.”

KindHouseBrainOne DayComputerScience FictionIncrediblesVariousFlyingWhat IfTechnologicalSpace Travel
Author:Arthur C. Clarke
Create image

“To be a science fiction writer you must be interested in the future and you must feel that the future will be different and hopefully better than the present. Although I know that most - that many science fiction writings have been anti-utopias. And the reason for that is that it's much easier and more exciting to write about a really nasty future than a - placid, peaceful one.”

WritingDifferentReasonExcitingScience FictionPeacefulHopefullyNasty
Author:Arthur C. Clarke
Create image

“A precondition for being a science fiction writer other than an interest in the future is that, an interest - at least an understanding of science, not necessarily a science degree but you must have a feeling for the science and its possibilities and its impossibilities, otherwise you're writing fantasy. Now, fantasy is also fine, but there is a distinction, although no one's ever been able to say just where the dividing lines come.”

WritingFeelingsUnderstandingInterestFantasyPossibilityScience FictionImpossibility
Author:Arthur C. Clarke
Create image

“There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.”

ThinkingMenWantDoeI CanRealFactsRealityMightFormLiteratureFictionIssuesConcernConcernedScience FictionOur FutureRight PlaceEscapismObjectionsOrigin Of Man
Author:Arthur C. Clarke
Create image

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

ScienceInterestingWonderVisionTechnologyMagicComputerSolutionsProgramScientistScience FictionProgrammingMagicianSkepticalSkepticComputer ProgrammingProgramming LanguagesInformation TechnologyScience And TechnologyAmazementComputer LanguageScientific DiscoveryMercenaryGreat ScienceMurphys LawComputer TechnologyPossible And ImpossibleScience TechnologyAwe And WonderDigital TechnologyFunny ComputerAdvanced TechnologyAdvances In ScienceComputer SystemsInternet TechnologyMagic Of LifeBest TechnologyTechnology And EducationScientist LifeOld TechnologyAdvanced CivilizationGreat TechnologyArt And TechnologyGood Technology
Author:Arthur C. Clarke
Create image