1928–1999 · American filmmaker · quoted the line in 1966 and twice declined to claim it
Stanley Kubrick, born 26 July 1928 and dead on 7 March 1999, was the American filmmaker who built 2001: A Space Odyssey together with Arthur C. Clarke, expanding Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel” into a novel and a script. The earliest close match for this saying that Quote Investigator has located is Kubrick quoting it in a 1966 New Yorker profile — and he went out of his way not to own it, crediting “one of the English science-fiction writers” then, and “a prominent astronomer” in Playboy in 1968. Clarke was named throughout that profile, so readers quietly filled in the blank Kubrick had left.