Quotes from Greg Egan

No wonder most fleshers had stampeded into the polises, once they had the chance: if disease and aging weren't reason enough, there was gravity, friction, and inertia. The physical world was one vast, tangled obstacle course of pointless, arbitrary restrictions.

Order my life. I'm nothing without you: fragments of time, fragments of words, fragments of feelings. Make sense of me. Make me whole.

Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything. Still

He was a bridger. He created you to touch other cultures. He wanted you to reach as far as you could.

It all adds up to normality.

What am I? The data? The process that generates it? The relationships between the numbers?

it was still the pre-eminent social networking site for the 0-3 age group

No one objects to the notion that every technological civilisation might undergo its own Introdus.

If you want to make it human, make it whole.

Opponents replied that when you modeled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modeled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed – no real digestion took place. So, when you modeled the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur?

When I was ten years old, all I gave my sweetheart was a pair of projections that turned the group of rotations in four dimensions into principal bundles over the three-sphere. Ancient constructions, though I did rediscover them for myself.' 'How were they received?' 'She liked them so much, she extended them to larger spaces and gave me back the result.

Because sex, drugs, and religion all hinge on the same kind of simple neurochemical events: addictive, euphoric, exhilirating - and all, equally, meaningless.

Don't underestimate the need to appeal to people's imaginations. Maybe you can see all the consequences of your work, already. Other people might need to have them spelled out explicitly." Maria

I used to think that if you changed from … valuing one thing to valuing another, it was because you'd learnt something new, understood something better. And it's not like that at all. I just value what I'm stuck with. That's it, that's the whole story. People make a virtue out of necessity. They sanctify what they can't escape.

I don't have any structured grand plan; I just intend to keep writing about the things that interest me-some of which change, some of which don't.

I've been taking longer to write stories lately.