Quotes from Neal Stephenson

Hollywood was merely a specialized bank—a consortium of large financial entities that hired talent, almost always for a flat rate, ordered that talent to create a product, and then marketed that product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium.

For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour—you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy.

Csongor played in a hockey league that appeared to supply 90 percent of his needs in the way of both exercise and companionship

In sum, the man's head looked like a Dutch oven forged over a dying fire with a ball-peen hammer.

Since the departure of King Coyote, Princess Nell had supposed herself entirely alone in the world. But now she saw cities of light beneath the waves and knew that she was alone only by her own choice.

This is not a Nora Roberts novel.

The goal was to find products that would keep on making money forever, long after the talent had been paid off and sent packing.

Perception and thought are properties of souls. It is no worse to posit that the fundamental building-block of the Universe is souls than to say it is wee bits of hard stuff, moving about in an empty space that is pervaded by mystickal Fields.

The place was famous for always having 'six comely maidens' working there," I said, with air quotes, "'serving the customers ale and aught.'" "What's aught?" asked Tristan. "Whatever you want it to be," I said.

Richard felt no guilt about this, since he had heard that Google Earth, in turn, was based on an idea from some old science-fiction novel.

Princes were taught a thing or two about being rational, as they were taught to play a little lute and dance a passable ricercar. But what drove their actions was their own force of will; in the end they did as they pleased, rational or not.

What makes one man's life more interesting than another's? In general, I should say that we find unpredictable or novel things more interesting.

Many set themselves the aim of rescuing the indifferent and the lazy—and end up lost themselves. The flame within them gets dim with the passage of time. So, if you have the fire, run, since you never know when it may be doused, leaving you stranded in darkness.

In the view of Hollywood, the techies of Silicon Valley were just a particularly naive form of talent.

I vivi rimasero a casa, infestando il mondo dei morti come fantasmi.

Says right here you are gung-ho." "Sir, yes sir!" "What the hell does that mean?" "Sir, it is a Chinese word! There's a Communist there, name of Mao, and he's got an army. We tangled with 'em on more'n one occasion, sir. Gung-ho is their battle cry, it means 'all together' or something like that, so after we got done kicking the crap out of them, sir, we stole it from them, sir!

Everything felt awkward. There was a sense of being on a perfectly good road in a perfectly sound car that was, however, veering into a ditch.

Dawn is slapping her chapped and reddened fingers against a frostbitten sky

Almost as miraculous as life itself was the number of ways it could end, or at least turn into a living hell. And for each of those there was a different, exquisitely evolved medical sub-subspecialty.

This is the guy. Raven. This is the guy that Juanita is looking for. The guy Lagos told him not to mess with. And Hiro has seen him before, outside the entrance to The Black Sun. This is the guy who gave the Snow Crash card to Da5id. The tattoo on his forehead consists of three words, written in block letters: POOR IMPULSE CONTROL.

The QUIPUs (Quantum Information Processing Units) that make up the Chronotron are capable of dealing with the infinite-pasts-as-weighted-by-plausibility calculations in SLIT (Something Less Than Infinite Time).

would draw P-38s as the scent of human flesh draws mosquitoes.

What is BFR?" asked Pete Starling. For the graph's vertical scale was labeled thus. "Bolide Fragmentation Rate

Tolkien's Dwarves were stout, taciturn, vaguely magical characters who spent a lot of time in the dark hammering out beautiful things, e.g. Rings of Power