We should not have assumed that a political space station could be built.
Treat your life like something to be sculpted.
In general, I don't know when inspiration will pop up.
I've spent a lot of my life among people brighter than myself.
I'm not predicting; I just love playing with superconductors.
We're looking as far ahead as we can, and we don't get penalized for mistakes.
I'd visit the near future, close enough that someone might want to talk to Larry Niven and can figure out the language; distant enough to get me decent medical techniques and a ticket to the Moon.
SF isn't a genre; SF is the matrix in which genres are embedded, and because the SF field is never going in any one direction at any one time, there is hardly a way to cut it off.