Bruce Sterling Quotes (1954-)

“I’ll grant you good intentions, but intentions don’t count for much. Corruption—that’s what counts.”

“The world doesn’t give a shit how noble your motives are—it’ll roll right over you. That’s how it works.”

“She’d read somewhere once that 90 percent of the world’s havoc was committed by men between fifteen and twenty-five.”

“Follow your weird, ladies and gentlemen. Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace your nerditude.”

“Centralized bureaucracies always protect the status quo. They don’t innovate. And it’s innovation that’s the real threat.”

“Interstitialism is very postmodern, in that it calls old definitions into question without bothering to invent plausible new ones.”

“Clearly, Mother de Gupta dearly loved motherhood – mostly, for the chance that it offered her to boss around small, helpless people.”

“The autumn sun shone brightly. It was still the same sun and the same clouds. The sun didn’t care about the landscape inside people’s heads.”

“Believe me there are few things deader or more obsolescent than a science fiction novel that predicts the future when the future has passed it by.”

“The Net was a lot like television, another former wonder of the age. The Net was a vast glass mirror. It reflected what it was shown. Mostly human banality.”

“Laura listened to their crude P. R. with sour amusement. They wouldn’t crank out this level of rhetoric unless they were trying to hide a real weakness, she thought.”

““But Dad... what if I just beat people up with my baton? Wouldn’t they have to do whatever I say?”
Pitar laughed. “That’s been tried. It never works out well.””

“Obsolescence and death, the reign of the archaic, the abandoned, and the corny: Really, if you saw Windows 3.0 on the sidewalk outside the building, would you bend over and pick it up?!?”

“Don't become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish.”

“My art, science fiction writing, is pretty new as literary arts go, but it labors under the curse of three thousand years of literacy. In some weird sense I'm in direct competition with Homer and Euripides.”

“Revolutions. New Orders. For Laura the words had the cobwebby taste of twentieth-century thinking. Visionary mass movements were all over the 1900s, and whenever they broke through, blood followed in buckets.”

“Mortality is one good reason why I'm writing books in the first place. For God's sake don't make me keep pace with the hardware, because I'm not really in the business of keeping pace, I'm really in the business of marking place.”

“I'm sure you could play some kind of computer game with very intelligent, very small, invisible computers...You could have some entertaining way to play with them, or more likely they would have some entertaining way to play with you.”