Bruce Sterling Quotes

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

These people are setting entire new standards for nightmarish postindustrial anti-chic. Only heavy-duty cosmopolitan San Francisco Bay area performance artists, who double as the Dilberts from Hell, could dress with such miraculous anti-fashion sense. ... Mark Pauline is a creative force first, a human being second, and a nice guy at a very distant tenth.

Maybe we were forced to conform to that tradition, for the sake of futurity. But the truth is, fatherhood was good to me. Today, there’s a boy, eight years old, who depends on me for guidance in this world. So now I realise: life can’t be all about me. Me, and my own favourite things: interaction design, aesthetics, robotics, metaphysics... When you and I built a child, that forced me to realise how much this life matters!

Mashups [...] nobody's going to listen to mashups in another ten years. Mashups are novelty music. They're like "The Monster Mash." They have no musical staying power. You're pursuing a phantom there. It's bad music, I mean, it's not bad— it's a pastiche, it's like magazine collage— which can be good for what it is. But to pretend that that's like tremendous creative work— No! It's a tremendous creative power— and it can have a tremendous audience, but it's not tremendously good. And we need a little bit of aesthetic honesty in confronting things like this. Just because it's new, and people with laptops can do it, and get away with it, and find an audience for it, does not make it a real cultural advance. It's an epiphenomenon.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Dark Age world had all kinds of potential issues that might bother Anita Atkinson: climate crisis, state collapse, financial ruin, mass extinction, catastrophic population dieback. None of those things bothered Anita, though, because she didn’t understand long words.

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

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.

There are a lot of times and places where "humanity" is headed in no place in particular. Those scenes interest me. Like, little European cultures with weird minority languages, who are just hanging around in obscure mountain valleys, making clay pots and singing, and knifing each other on Tuesdays... It's not like we all line up and dash like mad for some end-goal called "The Future." There's no victory-condition for being human. The future is just a kind of history that hasn't happened yet.

This <nowiki>[deconstruction]</nowiki> is a way for modern literateurs to handle this vast legacy of the past without actually getting any of the sticky stuff on you. It's like it's dead. It's like the next best thing to not having literature at all.