Greg Egan Quotes

Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.

You know what they say the modern version of Pascal's Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God.

Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century.

Fandom is about fandom, it's a great big social club.

Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I've been led astray like that myself at times.

For there is a truth which cannot be bought or sold, imposed by force, resisted or escaped.

On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed.

I'm rarely grabbed by anything the way I was when I was 10 years younger. About the only relatively new artists whose albums I own are Beck, and They Might Be Giants.

The Universe may be stranger than we can imagine, but it's going to have a tough time outdoing Egan.

I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.

I've supported myself by writing since 1992, and I'm probably very nearly unemployable by now because employers are likely to be put off by the long gap.

Being rewarded for anything other than the quality of their work is the fastest way to screw-up a writer-and it isn't only new ones who suffer from that.

I hadn't given much thought to the prospect of a Hugo nomination at the time it happened, but obviously once you're nominated, winning one seems a bit less far-fetched than before.

I admire David Lynch so much, and I think he made some bad decisions with Lost Highway.

Screw every known human culture.

If we spend all our time gazing at the wonders ahead without remembering where we're standing right now, we're going to trip and fall flat on our face, over and over again.

I've been taking longer to write stories lately.

Mathematics catalogues everything that is not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics is an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders.

Australian SF book publishing has undergone a boom recently, and sometimes it's easier for new writers to sell a book to a local publisher first, which then makes a US edition more likely.

Everyone here would die for the sake of truth. Everyone here lies constantly for the tiniest chance of personal gain. This is what it means to be a scientist.

A story in Asimov's is read by hundreds of thousands of people.

No, that’s journalism. The truth is whatever you can’t escape.

I think new writers everywhere need opportunities to get published.

I don't have any structured grand plan; I just intend to keep writing about the things that interest me-some of which change, some of which don't.

Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.

Would I have been happier? Maybe. But then, happiness was overrated.

How does it feel to be seven thousand years old? That depends. On what? On how I want to feel.

Who exactly am I saving from shame, when I’ll live and die in every possible way?

There was no truth in anything he said, anything he believed. It was all just an expression of his own needs.

They floated for a while, two flesher-shaped creatures and a giant worm in a cloud of spinning metal fragments, an absurd collection of imaginary debris, glinting by the light of the true stars.

How does it feel to be seven thousand years old?""That depends.""On what?""On how I want to feel.