Quotes from Robin Sloan

We range widely, we readers of fiction, but I think we all need a home. Mine is science fiction. It's my home shelf, my homeland, my home planet, my essential genre.

It turns out you can train a neural network on a big body of text. It can be Wikipedia; it can be all the works of Charles Dickens; it could be all of the Internet. They can use grammar and put words together in interesting and convincing ways - and, I think, unexpected and beautiful ways.

People tend to think of the quest as a sort of fanciful or fantastical form, but actually, I think it's pretty realistic. I think that story of gathering allies to your side - recruiting your band of companions - actually matches the shape of most great careers, most great lives.

If I look into my past, I was definitely into inventors. I was into stories of Edison and Tesla and da Vinci and all these guys making stuff in their garage.

Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines -- it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.

... nothing lasts long. We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment - maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere.

Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in.

In some ways I grew up in the public library in Troy, Michigan.

When you're making a print book in 2012, I actually think the onus is on you - and on your publisher - to make something that's worth buying in its physical edition.

I think one of the most exciting things about the whole digital side of publishing is that it eventually allows you to operate at any length. That also means shorter stuff, too.

Whether it's 'Fish' or 'Annabel Scheme' or 'The Truth About the East Wind,' I often find myself crafting custom containers to hold the kind of content I want to create.

If a shop has a neon Superman logo in the window, I will enter. If it has a neon Superman logo in the window, a Bat-symbol next to it, and a dragon under the eaves, I am already inside.

When you've biked only on quiet cul-de-sacs and college campuses, the idea of riding in the city, right up there alongside the cars, seems, frankly, pretty absurd.

There's certainly satire written about techies, but it's so snarky and snide and doesn't treat him as a whole person. The people I worked with at Twitter - they're very analytical, but they're also deep and thoughtful - I feel like they deserved a charismatic spokesperson.

'Gone Home' is a game about exploration, and everything you'll experience is tied intimately to the space of the spooky house around you. Your task is simple: Poke around.

A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.

You can go as far back as fifth grade, and you will find me tinkering with media and computers, making things that are a little off the beaten track.

Prediction just means you saw where the world might be going: ho-hum. Influence, though - ah. Influence, direct and acknowledged, means you actually steered the world, even if only a tiny bit.

A gift shouldn't feel like homework.

When I was 14, I spent a huge amount of time on the Internet, but not the Internet we know today. It was 1994, so while the World Wide Web existed, it wasn't generally accessible. Prodigy and CompuServe were popular, and AOL was on the rise, but I didn't have access to the web, and no one I knew had access to the web.

When MUDs appeared, that was an entirely novel experience, and often an addictive one. Long before Twitter or Snapchat, MUDs inspired the moral panic of the moment: a 1993 'Wired' article titled 'The Dragon Ate My Homework' described university students losing themselves in these virtual worlds. Keep in mind: they were just words on a screen.

Good writing is really meaningful, and it's one of the - it's still one of the best tools we have to get and capture people's attention.

I feel a little whirl of dislocation -- the trademark sensation of the world being more closely knit together than you expected

He asked <...> Rosemary, why do you love books so much? And I said, Well, I don't know <...> I suppose I love them because they're quiet, and I can take them to the park.