Top 15 Andy Weir Quotes

Don’t tell your stories to anyone. You’ll be more motivated knowing it’s a prerequisite to having an audience.

I was hired as a computer programmer for a national laboratory at age 15.

Designing a station with artificial gravity would undoubtedly be a daunting task. Space agencies would have to re-examine many reliable technologies under the light of the new forces these tools would have to endure. Space flight would have to take several steps back before moving forward again.

My first book was so horrible I have deleted all copies of it. Thankfully, it was before the Internet, so there are no lurking caches of it anywhere.

The reason space missions need artificial gravity is clear: humans simply did not evolve to live in zero gravity.

Research into manned spaceflight is shifting from low-Earth orbit to destinations much further away, like Mars and the asteroid belt. But society will have to invent many new technologies before it can plausibly send people to those distances.

You want an audience. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be a writer. The biggest motivation to write is the knowledge that someone will read it.

Computer programming is pretty much guaranteed income. I’m good at it, and I like it.

I was born too late to experience Apollo 11, though I do trek to Dad‘s house every time there’s some space event. There’s something awesome about crossing your fingers and watching a tense Mission Control room do their thing.

There’s more to research than just looking up facts. Eventually, you have to make subjective calls. If you’re writing a science fiction novel, there’s probably some speculative technology in it. You’ll have to decide how to project existing technology forward in a plausible way.

My father has a great love of science, and he indoctrinated me into it early. I think I was 12 or so when we designed a moon base.

Thanks to our modern era, facts are incredibly easy to come by. A few web searches for your subject matter, and you have all the information you could dream of.

I don’t take Mars One seriously at all.

Back in the days of Apollo, sending humans to the moon was the only viable way to get the scientific data we wanted. But now, with our computer and robotics technology, there’s very little an astronaut can do on Mars that a well-designed rover can’t.

A story in your head isn’t a story. It’s just a daydream until you actually write it down. So write it down.