Quotes from Bruce Sterling

He's crooked, he's corrupt, he's more sly and cynical than Cardinal Richelieu. But you know, to do him credit, there's something very broad-minded and forgiving about him. People who are civilized and also amoral, well, they don't make big, harsh demands. They're willing to let you be.

To the truly old, time was as thin as air, a keening and destructive wind that erased their pasts and attacked their memories.

Tears came to him. He wept quietly, holding nothing back. He mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute.

Without bacteria, the soil was a lifeless heap of imported lunar dust. With them, it was a constant mutational hazard.

They never forget what they can't have

I wonder if any of these strange places are still inhabited. Maybe they are all dead, and still running on automatic. They are haunted castles in virtual sand.

All workable standards of wealth had vaporized, digitized, and vanished into a nonstop hurricane of electronic thin air.

He loved Dottie, but he and Dottie always got along best by e-mail. E-mail was how he had first asked her out. E-mail was how they carried out their professional lives and coordinated their schedules. They often sent each other e-mail over the breakfast table when they were living inside the same house. They'd decided to have a child by e-mail. They'd been talking over e-mail about having another one.

The future is unwritten. there are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. both of them are great fun to write about if you' re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario. World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children.

If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.

He) mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute

A dagger is the noble weapon of Brutus. Everyone understands that tyrants fall to daggers. A bomb is a sordid modern device with many complex working parts. Only engineers understand bombs

We're so intelligent now that we're too smart to survive. We're so well informed that we lost all sense of meaning. We know the price of everything, but we've lost all sense of value. We have everyone under surveillance, but we've lost all sense of shame.

In a world so redolent with wonder, how can we allow ourselves to conduct our daily lives with so little insight, such absence of dignity?

Science fiction is not about the freedom of imagination. It's about a free imagination pinched and howling in a vise that other people call real life.

You give a guy a license to steal, you've got to expect him to use it.

I am not ranting. I possess a perspective here that you people, who are locked in the ivory basements of your own sub-cultures, simply do not possess.

I love both her and them. I have come to understand that she is what they are. A woman accepts a man, expecting that he will change. A man takes a woman, expecting that she will never change. They are both disappointed. Yet within this very disappointment is the primal source of all new men and all new women»

The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century's frontier.

Google and Facebook don't have "users" or "customers". Instead, they have participants under machine surveillance, whose activities are algorithmically combined within Big Data silos.

But the economy's out of control. Money just doesn't need human beings anymore. Most of us only get in the way.

We'll exchange rings, we'll throw rice. We'll put down roots.' We don't have roots. We're network people. We have aerials.

Looks like your sci-fi prediction came true right away, Xavier." "That can be gratifying," mused the novelist. "But not all the time."»

Someday the Sun will explode, and what about our journalism and poetry then? Well, so what? To hell with our exploding Sun. We have to do what we can do in the time we can act.