Neal Stephenson Quotes

What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing, it's deciding what to write.

The hour of noon has passed,' said Judge Fang. 'Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.

She's not afraid. She's wearing a dentata.

How could your cover be blown in Canada? Why even bother going dark there? How could you tell?

The less attractive the character, the more I enjoyed writing them. Officious bureaucrats and PowerPoint weasels are where it's at for me.

"The suspect had experienced a ballistic interlude earlier in the evening," Miss Pao said, "regrettably not filmed, and relieved himself of excess velocity by means of an ablative technique."

...your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.

So, you're worried that a pink dragon will fly over the concent and fart nerve gas on us?

The sight of the bare katana inspires everyone to a practically Nipponese level of politeness

Having a persistent nature is part of being human. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to speak of knowing another person, or loving them, or being their friend or enemy or rival.

A lot of secular, modern people claim to be disillusioned whenever they learn that any smart person is religious. That's applicable to Newton as it is to any other religious smart person

This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.

The mind knows...that there is an action principle that governs how the world evolves from one moment to the next - that restricts our world's path to points that tell an internally consistent story.

[Emacs] is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful.

Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor.

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.

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.

I actually don't think that there is a connection between the survival instinct and a hunger for immortality.

Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?" Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?

Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.

It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.

Clearly Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he's about to go down in flames.

Of persons I will say this: it is difficult to tell when they are running aright but easy to see when something has gone awry.

If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.

That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.

There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery

Wired people should know something about wires.

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.

Crappy old OSes have value in the basically negative sense that changing to new ones makes us wish we'd never been born.

The best way to know someone is to have a conversation with them.

Interesting things happen along borders - transitions - not in the middle where everything is the same.

It appeared that way, Lawrence, but this raised the question of was mathematics really true or was it just a game played with symbols? In other words—are we discovering Truth, or just wanking?

Topology is destiny, ' he said, and put the drawers on. One leg at a time.

think that if Hiro was so convinced in his own mind that he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew something she didn't.

The Bibliotheque du Roi then gives you the closest thing that currently exists to God's understanding of the world.""And yet with a bigger library we could come ever so much closer.

Persons of quality had devoted yester evening and much of the night to liquidating their holdings in the South Sea Company and gathering in clubs and coffeehouses to misinform one another.

You mentioned . . . one of the two great labyrinths into which the mind is drawn. What . . . is the other?""The other is the composition of the continuum, or: what is space?

Gold is the corpse of value...

To him it was a sort of hyperspace-librarian, girl-geek thing that he found clever and fetching without attracting him in a way that would have been creepy.

Most men would rather be shot through with a broad-headed arrow than be described by you.

How slow can a mammal be and still have respiratory functions?

If money is a science, then it is a dark science...it has gone on developing...by its own rules

Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs, " I said. "We have a protractor.

. . . if money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than alchemy. It split away from Natural Philosophy millennia ago, and has gone on developing ever since, by its own rules.

It's--my God--like you stretched a tarp across a stadium to turn it into a giant tom-tom and crashed a 747 into it.

See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places,

Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations.

We are all in trouble.... with a bunch of dead people.

That's not what I'm asking. I'm asking, what's your vice and what brand of trouble does it lead to?

He had spoken with such absolute confidence that I knew he had to be blowing this out of his rectal orifice.