Bruce Sterling Quotes

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.

When you're deconstructing a book it's like you're psychoanalyzing it, you're not studying it for what it says, you're studying it for the assumptions it makes and the cultural reasons for its assemblage.... What this essentially means is that you're not letting it touch you, you're very careful not to let it get its message through or affect you deeply or emotionally in any way.

I don't think that as a culture today we're very interested in tradition or continuity. No, we're a lot more interested in being a New Age and a revolutionary epoch, we long to reinvent ourselves every morning before breakfast and never grow old.

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.

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.

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.

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

You know when it really got bad here? When they tried to help. With medicine. And irrigation. They sank deep wells, with sweet, flowing water, and of course the nomads settled there. So instead of moving their herds on, leaving the pastures a chance to recover, they ate everything down to bare rock, for miles around every well. And the eight, nine children that African women have born from time immemorial—they all lived. It wasn’t that the world didn’t care. They struggled heroically, for generations, selflessly and nobly. To achieve an atrocity.

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.

Where there’s war, there’s whores.

You know what that is? That’s peasant technology, brother. It’s slash-and-burn agriculture. You know what that might do to what’s left of the planet’s tropical forests? It’ll make every straw-hat Brazilian into Paul Bunyan, that’s what. The most dangerous bio-tech in the world is a guy with a goat and an axe.

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.