Neal Stephenson: Trending quotes

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“Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microsoft is the very embodiment of modern high-tech prosperity — it is, in a word, bourgeois — and so it attracts all of the same gripes.”

Neal Stephenson

"Class Struggle on the Desktop"
In the Beginning... was the Command Line (1999)

“The opening screen of T’Rain was a frank rip-off of what you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no guilt about this, since he had heard that Google Earth, in turn, was based on an idea from some old science-fiction novel.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Thanksgiving (prologue)
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

“Give me an adventure. I’m not talking about some massive adventure. Just something that would make getting fired seem small. Something that I might remember when I’m old.”
“I can’t predict the future,” I said, “but based on what little I know so far, I’m afraid it has to be a massive adventure or nothing.”
“Great!”
“Probably the kind of adventure that ends in a mass burial.”

Neal Stephenson book Anathem

Cord and Erasmas, Part 6, "Peregrin"
Anathem (2008)

“People who claim they are motivated by the Purpose end up behaving differently—and generally better—than people who serve other masters,” Ty said.
“So it is like believing in God.”
“Maybe yes. But without the theology, the scripture, the pigheaded certainty.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

Epilogue
Seveneves (2015), Part Three

“He told us that a lone avout was being pursued by a mob. We saw it as an emergence.”

Neal Stephenson book Anathem

Vale leader explains to Raz how they came to rescue him, Part 7, "Feral"
Anathem (2008)

“This is a history, in that it intends to describe what happened and suggest why. … I may have fooled around with a few facts. But I served as witness until as close to the end as anyone could have … and so there is not so much art in this as to make it irrelevant.”

Neal Stephenson book The Big U

Early schema for author's now-familiar approach to historic events and persons; "The Go Big Red Fan" (prologue)
The Big U (1984)

“Is this a real blue-collar bar or a simulacrum thereof?”
“Both. It started out as a pure simulacrum, a few years ago, before the economy crashed, when it was hip for twentysomethings to move down here and dress in Carhartts and Utilikilts. But they did such a good job of it that actual blue-collar people began to show up. And then the economy did crash, and the hip people discovered that they were, in actual point of fact, blue collar, and probably always would be. So you’ve got guys here who run lathes. But they have colored Mohawks and college degrees, and they program the lathes in computer languages. I was trying to come up with a name for them. Cerulean-collar workers, maybe.”
“Do a lot of people stop by here on their way to the private jet terminal?”
“You’d be surprised.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Day 17, Seattle
Reamde (2011), Part II: American Falls

“Very old money was behind the Crow’s Nest. And enough of it that its Owners didn’t mind losing some every month to keep the place going. It was a kind of eleemosynary institution, created to serve not culture and not dukh, but a thing called the Purpose. And if Ty kept working there for another few decades, perhaps one of the Owners would sit him down one day in the Bolt Hole and deign to tell him what exactly the Purpose was.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"Five Thousand Years Later"
Seveneves (2015), Part Three

“Both of them have seen many young Western men arrive here on business missions and completely lose control of their sphincters and become impediments to any kind of organized activity. Daily hired Wall because, like Daily, he is a stable family man who has his act together…and they seem to be making excellent progress toward their goal, which is to run two really expensive wires across the Malay Peninsula. They tend to be absolutely straight shooters…. Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today. On the other hand, if I had an unlimited amount of money and woke up tomorrow morning with a burning desire to see a 2,000-hole golf course erected on the surface of Mars, I would probably call men like Daily and Wall, do a handshake deal with them, send them a blank check, and not worry about it.”

Neal Stephenson

"Mother Earth Mother Board," cover story in Wired, 4.12 (1996)

“[Doc Dubois] had been focusing all of his attention in the other direction, on Peach Pit and its iron-rich “children,” PP1, PP2, and PP3, nailing down their exact orbital parameters, taking high-res photographs.
PP3 was especially interesting. It was a congealed glob of mostly iron, similar in composition to Amalthea. It was some fifty kilometers in diameter. And it had a deep cleft on one side, comparable in size to the Grand Canyon, apparently formed by a collision that had rent its outer skin while it was partly congealed. Doob had begun calling PP3 Cleft.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"Day 700"
Seveneves (2015), Part Two

“Any property that's open to common use gets destroyed. Because everyone has incentive to use it to the max, but no one has incentive to maintain it.”

Neal Stephenson book Zodiac

Source: Zodiac (1988), Chapter 8

“Any event largely organized by elementary school teachers was likely to come off extremely well from a logistical and crowd-control standpoint.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"The Seven Sisters"
Seveneves (2015), Part One

“Richard’s ex-girlfriends were long gone, but their voices followed him all the time and spoke to him, like Muses or Furies. It was like having seven superegos arranged in a firing squad before a single beleaguered id, making sure he didn’t enjoy that last cigarette.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Thanksgiving (prologue)
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

“I think visual literacy and media literacy is not without value, but I think plain old-fashioned text literacy and mathematical literacy are much more powerful and flexible ways to organize your mind.”

Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson coins the term "text literacy" during interview for the article "Pushing the Edge With 'Diamond Age' Nano-Machines," Associated Press, May 10, 1995

“We need brains, is the bottom line," Ivy said. "We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn't bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It's our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"Cleft"
Seveneves (2015), Part Two

“"It might interest you to know that our state is tired of being used as a chemical toilet so that people in Utah can have plastic lawn furniture."
"I can't believe an assistant attorney general came right out and said that."
"Well, I wouldn't say it in public."”

Neal Stephenson book Zodiac

"Cohen," the assistant attorney general of an unnamed East Coast state meeting covertly with Sangamon Taylor near the Jersey Shore. Chapter 11
Zodiac (1988)

“One of the problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic horror story. I've lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an ingredients label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time.”

Neal Stephenson book Zodiac

Source: Zodiac (1988), Chapter 1

“The Walmart was like a starship that had landed in the soybean fields. … They went inside. The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Thanksgiving (prologue)
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

“I wanted to create an interesting scifi universe that didn’t violate the laws of physics, and that means that you’re limited to staying inside the solar system. I also wanted to get away from the ship-centric style of science fiction. Star Trek is ship-centric and it’s all about the Enterprise — there are many other examples. What if we decided to get away from the obsession with ships and instead thought about big machines and structures that might be used to create a civilization inside the solar system?”

Neal Stephenson

About Seveneves, "Here's How Space Megastructures Will Look, According to Neal Stephenson" in Gizmodo, interviewed by Annalee Newitz, May 20, 2015 (pre-Zero)

“Quantum interference—the crosstalk among similar quantum states—knits the different versions of your brain together."
"You're saying that my consciousness extends across multiple cosmi," I said. "That's a pretty wild statement."
"I'm saying all things do," Orolo said. "That comes with the polycosmic interpretation. The only thing exceptional about the brain is that it has found a way to use this.”

Neal Stephenson book Anathem

Part 8, "Orithena"
Anathem (2008)