Quotes from Paolo Bacigalupi

I think that we live in a highly specialized, technologically advanced society. Highly developed societies tend to have very remote understandings about what underlies our prosperity.

I think there are narratives going on all the time that we think of as tangential - up until they turn out to be deciding factors in our lives.

I'm less crazy and unhappy when I'm writing.

Science fiction has these obsessions with certain sciences - large scale engineering, neuroscience.

I'm particularly interested in black swan events: unprecedented surprises that destroy the conventional wisdom about how the world works.

Fiction is optimistic or unrealistic enough to demand that there should be a meaningful narrative.

I started really thinking a lot about where does a country go when we stop being able to speak to each other, when a nation stops being able to solve problems because its ideological differences become so deep that it just becomes dysfunctional.

Maybe storytelling belongs in audio - a short story is the length of a commute. That can be a sacred spot where you have the ear of the reader without having to compete with other media like games or TV.

Originally, 'The Windup Girl' started as a short story - a very gnarly, complicated short story set in Bangkok that didn't work very well.

When we live the 21st-century good life, almost every aspect of it is predicated on not looking at the implications of what we're up to. Happiness at this point has a lot to do with not looking, so you don't feel complicit in some vast and awful enterprise.

I was interested in political failure here in the U.S. The way we're failing to work together to solve even our smallest problems, let alone the complex ones.

Blood is not destiny.

Laws are a fine thing on paper, but painful when no bribery can ease their bind.

Politics is ugly. Never doubt what small men will do for great power.

Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way of justice.

Knowledge is simply a terrible ocean we must cross, and hope that wisdom lies on the other side.

They say in the military that a good battle plan can last as long as five minutes in real fighting. After that, it comes down to if the general is favored by fate and the spirits.

You're saying that you yoked the world to your patented grains and seeds, happily enslaved us alland now you finally realize that you are dragging us all to hell.

All life produces waste. The act of living produces costs, hazards and disposal questions, and so the (Environment) Ministry has found itself in the center of all life, mitigating, guiding and policing the detritus of the average person along with investigating the infractions of the greedy and short-sighted, the ones who wish to make quick profits and trade on others lives for it.

Food should come from the place of its origin, and stay there. It shouldnt spend its time crisscrossing the globe for the sake of profit. We went down that path once, and it brought us to ruin.

Every time he makes plans for his future, he seems to fail. Every time he reaches forward, the world leans against him, pressing him down.

At first, when California started winning its water lawsuits and shutting off cities, the displaced people just followed the waterright to California. It took a little while before the bureaucrats realized what was going on, but finally someone with a sharp pencil did the math and realized that taking in people along with their water didn't solve a water shortage.

We write dust epitaphs for our vanquished enemies and watch them blow away in the desert wind.

Never doubt what small men will do for great power.