In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-best science writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fiction writer. [dedication to Isaac Asimov from Arthur C. Clarke in his book Report on Planet Three]
Interpretation
This quote highlights the mutual respect and acknowledgment between two prominent figures in science fiction and science writing.
Arthur C. Clarke's dedication to Isaac Asimov serves as a testament to the camaraderie and admiration that exists among great writers within the same genre. By referring to himself as the 'second-best' science writer and Asimov as the 'second-best' science fiction writer, Clarke humorously downplays their achievements while simultaneously honoring their contributions to literature and science. This quote reflects the humility and respect that often characterize the relationships between peers in intellectual fields.
In practice
In a literary discussion, one might cite this quote to illustrate how great writers often recognize and celebrate each other's talents.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
If certain books are to be termed 'immigrant fiction,' what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn't agree with me.
My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves.
I noticed in America that if you write a book of any kind, you're made to be the representative of all the issues that might surround it.
I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.
People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.
When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.
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