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Neal Stephenson citations
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Neal Town Stephenson, né le 31 octobre 1959 à Fort Meade dans le Maryland, est un auteur de science-fiction américain, plusieurs fois lauréat du prix Locus.

Son œuvre associe sciences, technologies de l'information et histoire, encadrées par des récits relevant de la science-fiction ou de l'uchronie. Son travail est à ce titre souvent comparé à celui de Thomas Pynchon. Wikipedia  

✵ 31. octobre 1959
Neal Stephenson photo
Neal Stephenson: 167   citations 0   J'aime

Neal Stephenson: Citations en anglais

“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.”

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Neal Stephenson livre 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.”

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Neal Stephenson livre 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.”

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Neal Stephenson livre 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.”

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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.”

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Neal Stephenson livre 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."”

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Neal Stephenson livre 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.”

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Neal Stephenson livre 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.”

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Neal Stephenson livre 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?”

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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.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Anathem

Part 8, "Orithena"
Anathem (2008)

“I guess that people like to think they are not only living but propagating their way of life."
"That's right. People have a need to feel that they are part of some sustainable project. Something that will go on without them. It creates a feeling of stability. I believe that the need for that kind of stability is as basic and as desperate as some of the other, more obvious needs. But there's more than one way to get it.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Anathem

Orolo and Raz, Part 4, "Anathem"
Anathem (2008)

“The launch vehicle, a fantailed Soyuz-FG, had been towed horizontally across the steppe on a special train, complete with smoke-belching locomotive, to the launch pad…. The contrast with the NASA way of doing things was stark…. Doob’s youngest son was distracted by the sight of stray dogs copulating a hundred meters away from ground zero. The launch bunker, shockingly close to the pad, had a little vegetable patch where the technicians were growing cucumbers and tomatoes.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Seveneves

“Pioneers and Prospectors"
Seveneves (2015), Part One

“Three days before launch, the hedge fund man had been nipped by a stray dog while rehearsing a launch pad escape sequence, and everything had been thrown into disarray as the dog was chased across the steppe by militiamen in wheeled vehicles, locals on horseback, and a helicopter gunship. After they had run it to ground they had shipped it off to a veterinary lab to be checked for rabies.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Seveneves

"Pioneers and Prospectors"
Seveneves (2015), Part One

“…he had found an image of one of the big Western-style business hotels along the waterfront: one of those places where it was possible to be a white person without attracting one’s own personal Stonehenge of cataleptic, openmouthed gapers.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Xiamen, Day 4
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

“Why Baroque? Because it is set in the Baroque, and it IS baroque. Why Cycle? Because I am trying to avoid the T-word ("trilogy"). In my mind this work is something like 7 or 8 connected novels. These have been lumped together into three volumes because it is more convenient from a publishing standpoint, but they could just as well have been put all together in a single immense volume or separated into 7 or 8 separate volumes. So to slap the word "trilogy" on it would be to saddle it with a designation that is essentially bogus. Having said that, I know everyone's going to call it a trilogy anyway.”

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Neal Stephenson

Baroque Cycle entry in now-defunct MetaWeb

“This was part of Corporation 9592’s strategy; they had hired psychologists, invested millions in a project to sabotage movies—yes, the entire medium of cinema—to get their customers/players/addicts into a state of mind where they simply could not focus on a two-hour-long chunk of filmed entertainment without alarm bells going off in their medullas telling them that they needed to log on to T’Rain and see what they were missing.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Day 15
Reamde (2011), Part II: American Falls

“IF YOU ARE ACCUSTOMED to reading works of speculative fiction and enjoy puzzling things out on your own, skip this Note. Otherwise, know that the scene in which this book is set is not Earth, but a planet called Arbre that is similar to Earth in many ways.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Anathem

Note to the Reader
Source: Anathem (2008)

“By this point he had seen enough of them to know that they were cooler under pressure, and better to be within a tight spot, than 999 out of 1,000 women. But their presence obliged him to divert a significant fraction of his attention into being considerate of their needs, responding to their inquiries, and keeping them alive.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Day 21
Reamde (2011), Part II: American Falls

“He kept flinching. The low sun shone in the face of a two-hundred-foot-tall wind turbine in the field across the crick, and its blades cast long scything shadows over them. … The sun above blinking on and off with each cut of a blade. … Something about their being in motion, in a place where everything else was almost pathologically still, seized the attention; they always seemed to be jumping out at you from behind corners.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

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

“Kath Two was Survey. Whether or not this made her military was a topic of almost theological complexity.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Seveneves

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

“Tris was pudgy and not especially good looking, but she had the personality of a beautiful girl because she'd been raised in a math.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Anathem

Part 10, "Messal." (A "math" is a co-ed academic/research monastery. Most of the novel takes place in maths.)
Anathem (2008)

“But Richard had already gone the cop route and found it not nearly as productive as driving around with a sledgehammer and retaining the services of men with oxyacetylene torches.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Day 6
Reamde (2011), Part II: American Falls

““If you show her too much favor she will be punished. If you touch her, we’re all dead,” Ty said.
“Why?” Einstein asked.
“Because this is one of those cultures that is psychotic about female reproductive organs.””

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Neal Stephenson livre Seveneves

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

“The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different.”

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Neal Stephenson

A Conversation With Neal Stephenson http://www.sfsite.com/10b/ns67.htm

“Ha ha noob, you are pwned by troll. I have encrypt all your file. Leave 1000 GP at below coordinates and I give you key”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

The REAMDE virus’ accompanying message, Day 1
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

“Sokolov put the odds at 100 percent that Peter would, sooner or later, do something stupid and cause enormous trouble. Peter would do this because he believed he was clever and because he thought only of himself. It would be safer to take him out and shoot him now, but disposing of the body would be difficult and the shock of it would probably disturb the equilibrium of Zula.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Day 2
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

“So in order to accommodate the Pioneers who would begin arriving in a few weeks, the Arkitects sent up Scouts. The qualifications for being a Scout seemed to be a shocking level of physical endurance, a complete disregard for mortal danger, and some knowledge of how to exist in a space suit.
All of them were Russian.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Seveneves

"Scouts"
Seveneves (2015), Part One

“There is nearly always a chthonic link. The object-imbued-with-numinous-power tends to be of mineral origin: gold, perhaps mined from a special vein, or a jewel of extraordinary rarity, or a sword forged from a shooting star. I am merely describing pulp. But the vast popularity…attests to the power of these motifs to seize the reader’s attention, down at the level of the reptilian brain, even as the cerebrum is getting sick.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Donald Cameron, flashback to development of T'Rain, Day 2
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

“The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero.
An amateur astronomer in Utah was the first person on Earth to realize that something unusual was happening. Moments earlier, he had noticed a blur flourishing in the vicinity of the Reiner Gamma formation, near the moon’s equator. He assumed it was a dust cloud thrown up by a meteor strike. He pulled out his phone and blogged the event.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Seveneves

Opening paragraphs of the novel; "The Age of the One Moon"
Seveneves (2015), Part One

“The mere suggestion that it might be possible to look at a thing from more than one point of view was infuriating to these people.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Seveneves

"Five Thousand Years Later"; referring to the Diggers
Seveneves (2015), Part Three

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