Neal Stephenson famous quotes

03-28-2025

A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.
-- Neal Stephenson

#Clutter #Basements #Universe
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

#Real #People #Needs
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest ***** in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
-- Neal Stephenson

#Art #Revenge #Real
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

#Christian #Atheist #Intelligent
Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.
-- Neal Stephenson

#Talent #Ability
When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.
-- Neal Stephenson

#Wrestling #Men #Winning
What are letters?â€ â€œKinda like mediaglyphics except theyâ€™re all black, and theyâ€™re tiny, they donâ€™t move, theyâ€™re old and boring and really hard to read. But you can use â€™em to make short words for long words.
-- Neal Stephenson

#Moving #Long #Black
Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to beâ€”or to be indistinguishable fromâ€”self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.
-- Neal Stephenson

#Games #Self #Years
Boredom is a mask frustration wears.
-- Neal Stephenson

#Frustration #Boredom #Mask
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

#Oxygen #Atmosphere #Trying
Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.
-- Neal Stephenson

#Sound #Noise #Barriers
See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places,
-- Neal Stephenson

#Powerful #World
To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.
-- Neal Stephenson

#Facts #Nuance #Vapor
Gold is the corpse of value...
-- Neal Stephenson

#Gold #Values
... you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that 'Diax's Rake' ...
-- Neal Stephenson

#Believe #Rakes #Should
Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thingâ€”is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?" Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?
-- Neal Stephenson

#Differences #Snow #Waiting
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

#Meditation #Everyday #Kabbalah
Am I a technocrat? Im just a guy who went down to the bookstore and bought a couple of textbooks on TCP/IP, which is the underlying protocol of the Internet, and read them. And then I signed on to a computer, which anyone can do nowadays, and I messed around with it for a few years, and now I know all about it. Does that make me a technocrat?
-- Neal Stephenson

#Couple #Years #Guy
Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development. Developers can build their own small streets feeding off of the main one. They can build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality, such as vast hovering overhead light shows and special neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignored.
-- Neal Stephenson

#Reality #Light #Special
I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.
-- Neal Stephenson

#Use #Might
That's funny because if anyone actually did prove the existence of God we'd just tell him 'nice proof, Fraa Bly' and start believing in God.
-- Neal Stephenson

#Nice #Believe #Proof
It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.
-- Neal Stephenson

#Design #Use #Movement
Two tires fly. Two Wail. A bamboo grove, all chopped down From it, warring songs.
-- Neal Stephenson

#Song #Two #Bamboo
Jad said, "The leakage was forcing choices, the making of which in no way improved matters." Okay. So we were, in effect, locked in a room with a madman sorcerer. That clarified things a little.
-- Neal Stephenson

#Choices #Littles #Matter
Hiro watches the large, radioactive, spear-throwing killer drug lord ride his motorcycle into Chinatown. Which is the same as riding it into China, as far as chasing him down is concerned.
-- Neal Stephenson

#Drug #Motorcycle #Watches

You may also like:

Alastair Reynolds
Author
Bruce Sterling
Author
Charles Stross
Writer
China Mieville
Author
Cory Doctorow
Blogger
Dan Simmons
Author
David Foster Wallace
Novelist
Ernest Cline
Novelist
Greg Bear
Author
Iain Banks
Author
Isaac Asimov
Author
John Scalzi
Author
Kim Stanley Robinson
Writer
Peter F. Hamilton
Author
Philip K. Dick
Novelist
Robert A. Heinlein
Science writer
Thomas Pynchon
Novelist
Ursula K. Le Guin
Author
Vernor Vinge
Computer Scientist
William Gibson
Novelist