Stanislaw Lem
Stanislaw Lem
Stanisław Herman Lem; 12 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy, and satire, and a trained physician. Lem's books have been translated into forty-one languages and have sold over forty-five million copies. From the 1950s to 2000s, he published many books, both science fiction and philosophical/futurological. He is best known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976, Theodore Sturgeon wrote...
NationalityPolish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 September 1921
CountryPoland
Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote.
We didn't know each other well. I never had the time. Now I see that it doesn't make any difference. The ones who hurry and the ones who take their time all end up in the same place. Just don't have any regrets. No regrets.
I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.
A writer should not run around with a mirror for his countrymen; he should tell his society and his times things no one ever thought before.
The only writers who have any peace are the ones who don't write. And there are some like that. They wallow in a sea of possibilities. To express a thought, you first have to limit it, and that means kill it. Every word I speak robs me of a thousand others, and every line I write means giving up another.
I had no hope. Yet expectation lived on in me, the last thing she had left behind. What further consummations, mockeries, torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over.
...it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.
If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?
I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.
There are friends with whom we share neither interests nor any particular experiences, friends with whom we never correspond, whom we seldom meet and then only by chance, but whose existence nonetheless has for us a special if uncanny meaning. For me the Eiffel Tower is just such a friend, and not merely because it happens to be the symbol of a city, for Paris leaves me neither hot nor cold. I first became aware of this attachment of mine when reading in the paper about plans for its demolition, the mere thought of which filled me with alarm.
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane, Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to _ n, Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Futurologists have been multiplying like flies since the day Herman Kahn made Cassandra 's profession "scientific," yet somehow not one of them has come out with the clear statement that we have wholly abandoned ourselves to the mercy of technological progress. The roles are now reversed: humanity becomes, for technology, a means, an instrument for achieving a goal unknown and unknowable.
Practically all SF is trash.
The demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature.