Quotes from Alastair Reynolds

I had an artistic streak and was good at painting and drawing and also very good at English, but I did want to be a scientist. The education system means you have to choose physics or Shakespeare. It can't be both.

We've had science fiction novels where China is dominant; we've had novels where India is dominant, and I suppose it's all about getting away from that cliched old tired idea that the future belongs to the West.

I think I set myself on a course to become a scientist around about the time that Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' series was on television, and there really was no going back for me at that point, and then I went on to study space science and then get my Ph.D., then go aboard and work in the European Space Agency.

A city's only ever three hot meals away from anarchy.

I think I've reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level.

It's the people who don't worry—those who never have any doubts that what they're doing is good and right—they're the ones that cause the problems.

You worry that we're becoming monsters. Merlin, we already were monsters. You didn't make us any worse.

There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail. It was the same thing whether the lights belonged to a caravel battling the swell on a stormy horizon or a diamond-hulled starship which had just sliced its way through interstellar space.

I don't know. That was typical Sajaki; like all the genuinely clever people Sylveste had met he knew better than to feign understanding where none existed.

It looked like a biology lesson for gods, or a snapshot of the kind of pornography which might be enjoyed by sentient planets.

Can we drop the 'artificial intelligence'? It's a bit like me calling you a meat-based processing system.

if human beings really grasped how synthetic their world was - how much of it was stitched together not from direct perception, but from interpolation, memory, educated guesswork - they would go quietly mad.

Everything came and went, everything was new and bright with promise once and old and worn out later, and everything left a small, diminishing stain on eternity, a mark that time would eventually erase.

The first six million years had been all fun and games.

How did you . . . pass the time?' Sunday asked. 'You couldn't just ching out of it, could you?' 'We had a different form of chinging,' Eunice said. 'An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it "reading".

It's an ancient technique known as lying, Khouri.

Enjoy it, kid. Enjoy feeling that you can make a difference.' Floyd flashed him a smile. 'It won't last for ever.

Meddling is what we do. It's what defines us. Meddling gave us fire and tools and civilisation and the keys to the universe. Fingers will get burnt along the way, yes. That's the way of it.

Matter is lazy. It resists change. It wants to keep on doing whatever it's doing, whether that's sitting still or moving. We call that laziness inertia, but that doesn't mean we understand it. For a thousand years we've labelled it, quantified it, caged it in equations, but we've still only scratched the surface of what it really is.

The human capacity for grief. It just isn't capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn't just level off—it just gives up, resets itself to zero. Admit it. None of us feel a damn about these people.

Even monsters are beautiful.

As the old saying went, the Manhattan Project wasn't built in a day. Or was that Rome? Something to do with Earth, anyway.

War was about yawning chasms of inactivity, punctuated by brief, screaming interludes of action. And in those brief, screaming interludes, events happened both quickly and with dreamlike slowness, every instant burned into memory.

Life is precious. Infinitely so. Perhaps it takes a machine intelligence to appreciate that. ~Understanding Space & Time