Neal Stephenson Quotes

152 Sourced Quotes

One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for may people, is not that he's socially inept - because everybody's been there - but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it.

Neal Stephenson
Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight.

Neal Stephenson
The difference between stupid and intelligent people - and this is true whether or not they are well-educated - is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.

Neal Stephenson
Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relations come into being?

Neal Stephenson
Now, at the little southern black college where I went to school, we had no megadorms. We were cool at the right times and academic at the right times.... Boston University, where I did my Master's … most students had no time for sonic war, and the rest vented their humors in the city, not in the dorms. Ohio State was nicely spread out, and I lived in an apartment complex where noisy shit-for-brains undergrads were even less welcome than tweedy black bachelors.

Neal Stephenson
There was a white man sitting at the kitchen table, warming his hands by wrapping them around a hot cup of tea. He had kind of an oblong face, curly red hair piled on top, a close-cropped but dense red beard, shocking blue eyes that always looked wide open. He face was ruddy with the outdoors, and the way he was sitting there with that tea, he looked so calm, so centered, almost like he was in meditation. When I came in, he looked at me and smiled just a trace, without showing his teeth…

Neal Stephenson
This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood. As long as you made a point of hanging out exclusively with people who had the wit to see and to understand that objective reality, you didn't have to waste a lot of time talking. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn't necessary to have a meeting about it. The sales force didn't need to get involved.

Neal Stephenson
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
In four years of work, I've idled my Zodiac down every one of its thousands of inlets, looked at every inch of its fractal coastline and found every single goddamned pipe that empties into it. Some of the pipes are big enough to park a car in and some are the size of your finger, but all of them have told their story to my gas chromatograph. And often it's the littlest pipes that cause the most damage. When I see a big huge pipe coming right out of a factory, I'm betting the pumpers have at least read the EPA regs. But when I find a tiny one, hidden below the waterline, sprouting from a mile-wide industrial carnival, I put on gloves before taking my sample.
And sometimes the gloves melt.

Neal Stephenson
As a fantasy writer, he was not highly regarded (one cannot call him profoundly mediocre without venturing so far out on the critical limb as to bend it to the ground, so derivative that the reader loses track of who he's ripping off, to say he is tin-eared would render a disservice to a blameless citizen of the periodic table of the elements).

Neal Stephenson
I don't even want you to nod, that's how much you annoy me. Just freeze and shut up.

Neal Stephenson
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
Technically, of course, he was right. Socially, he was annoying us.

Neal Stephenson
This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.

Neal Stephenson
Richard resumed reading the T'Rain Gazette, a daily newspaper (electronic format, of course)... which summarized what had been going on all over T'Rain during the preceding twenty-four hours:
Notable achievements, wars, duels, sackings, mortality statistics, plagues, famines... untoward spikes in commodity prices.

Neal Stephenson
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.

Neal Stephenson
Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds.

Neal Stephenson
Leibniz is at the disadvantage of not having seen it. Or perhaps we should count this as an advantage, for anyone who sees it is dumbfounded by the brilliance of the geometry, and it is difficult to criticize a man's work when you are down on your knees shielding your eyes.

Neal Stephenson
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.

Neal Stephenson
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
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.

Neal Stephenson
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.

Neal Stephenson
Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.

Neal Stephenson
Which path do you intend to take, Nell?' said the Constable, sounding very interested. 'Conformity or rebellion?' Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded - they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.

Neal Stephenson
He had a sense of irony that ruled his life, made it impossible for him to use his considerable brains in any kind of serious job. Kind of like me.

Neal Stephenson
"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
For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.

Neal Stephenson
They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.

Neal Stephenson
In the whole world, there might have been as many as ten thousand people who were better than Sokolov at falling and rolling around on hard surfaces. Circus acrobats and aikido masters, mostly. Also included in that group would have been many of the younger Spetsnaz men. The remaining six billion or so living humans did not even enter the picture.

Neal Stephenson
Most Kabbalists were theorists who were interested only in pure meditation. But there were so-called 'practical Kabbalists' who tried to apply the power of the Kabbalah in everyday life.

Neal Stephenson