Bruce Sterling Quotes

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.

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.

Agriculture is the oldest and most vicious of humanity’s bio-technologies.

Don't aim to be civilized. Don't hope that straight people will keep you on as some kind of pet. To hell with them...Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird and don't do it halfway, put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it.

Tomorrow composts today.

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

Emily Dickinson didn't even publish books, she just wrote these demented little poems with a quill pen and hid them in her desk, but they still fought their way into the world, and lasted on and on and on. It's damned hard to get rid of Emily Dickinson, she hangs on like a tick in a dog's ear.

Working seriously, improving your taste and perception and understanding, knowing what you are and where you came from, not only improves your work in the present, but gives you a chance of influencing the future and links you to the best work of the past. It gives you a place to take a solid stand.

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.

Ladies and gentlemen to hell with the marvellous power of storytelling. If the audience for science fiction wanted storytelling, they wouldn't read goddamned science fiction, they'd read Harpers and Redbook and Argosy... We're not into science fiction because it's "good literature," we're into it because it's weird.

As tempers rose, a compromise was urged by certain moderates, whom everyone ignored.

Science fiction is a pop medium and a very obsolescent medium...science fiction has a hard time wrapping itself in the traditional mantle of literary excellence... we try to do this sometimes, but generally we have to be really drunk first.

As a philosophical problem, it comes down to a better way to engage with the passage of time; and I think we're getting close to one, because the imaginative loss of the future is becoming acute.
The most effective political actors on the planet now are people who want to blow themselves up.
These are people who really don't want to get out of the bed in the morning and face another unpredictable day.

The real advantage of CDs is that they allow you to forget all your vinyl records. You think you love this record collection that you've amassed over the years. But really the sheer choice, the volume, the load of memory there is secretly weighing you down. You're never going to play those Alice Cooper albums again, but you can't just throw them away, because you're a culture nut.