Max Barry Quotes

People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they'll spend all day telling you who they are.

That's the thing you learn about values: they're what people make up to justify what they did.

When it's done with being graceful and poetic, language is meant to communicate, after all.

There's no requirement that jobs be meaningful. If there was, half the country would be unemployed.

The most fundamental thing about a person is desire. It defines them. Tell me what a person wants, truly wants, and I'll tell you who they are, and how to persuade them.

Apparently we're now in a state where most ads are full of people looking at us in a way that would heat us up down to our toes if it happened in real life, and we don't think anything of it.

When someone thinks, "I liked his last book, I'll hope this new one is good" and shells out their hard-earned, I fervently want that person to be thrilled.

Elizabeth is smart, ruthless, and emotionally damaged ... [i]f Elizabeth's brain was a person, it would have scars, tattoos, and be missing one eye.

every story written is marks upon a page The same marks, repeated, only differently arranged

Some people would break the rules to get things done and some wouldn't; it was simple as that. John didn't have much use for the latter.

Hey, I saw this old British movie, all the people spoke so different, you could hardly understand them. But everyone here speaks American as good as you and me. What's with that?

Corporations! It's like there are these gigantic monsters living among us, and we don't mind that they're monsters because when we look at them they smile and hand us cheeseburgers. That's nuts.

I will not be what I was made, but what I make.

[S]he was in a pretty crazy place, screaming and waving the bucket-knife around, spattered with blood from head to toe. Lee was lying on the floor, quietly pumping out his life through his throat.

Wil ate without enthusiasm. His bacon tasted like nothing. Like a dead animal, fried. His eggs, aborted chickens.

'Your brain doesn't process language quite like other people. Why that is, I have no idea.' 'I have a superior brain?' 'Uh, ' Eliot said, 'I wouldn't go that far.'

Within perfect walls there is nothing worth protecting. There is, in fact, nothing. And so we exchange privacy for intimacy.

Well, I like to know where I'm going before I try to get there. It's a mistake to try to execute a plan before you've thought of one, in my experience.

It was always this way: The more people talked, the more they obscured. You didn't need to argue for the truth. You could see it.