Ian McDonald Quotes

His theory of golf is, never play any sport that requires you to dress as your grandfather.

The freefall sex? Grossly oversold. Everything moves in all the wrong ways. Things get away from you. You have to strap everything down to get purchase. It’s more like mutual bondage.

Profit, Empire, Industry. What was a dead lake, a few poisoned rivers, a few slagged hillsides? Priorities, that was what it was about. Priorities and Progress.

Only miscalculation could kill you in interstellar war. The equations were hard but they were fair.

That old saw about a problem shared being a problem halved? Damnable lie. A problem shared is a problem doubled.

Any aeai [A.I., artificial intelligence ] smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it.

These songs were the true names of things, spoken by the soul, so easily buried under the little busynesses of everyman everyday.

It was not socialism or communism or Islamism. It was romanticism. There is no more incandescent passion than love in a time of revolution.

Nationalism, then Islamism, both twentieth-century inventions, destroyed the Greek civilization in Egypt that had endured for three thousand years.

Ghosts? Pah. We are the most substantial things in the world, the foundations of the present. We are memories.

Half your DNA's owned by some biotech corporation. Every time you have sex, you break copyright.

This is now a matter of national security, sir. This is Franz Kafka, is what it is. Tom Hanks looks at chair-rocker, who writes the name down. He's a Czech writer, Thomas Lull says. He's been dead a hundred years. I was attempting irony. Sir, please do not attempt irony. This is a most serious issue.

The laws of economics are subject to the laws of physics. The physical processes that govern this planet and the continued life upon it place as stringent an upper limit on economic growth as the speed of light does on our knowledge of the universe.

The closer they come to the object of desire the more reluctant they are to grasp it. The search is the thing. The process is the purpose. The final mystery can only be anticlimactic. The story is ended.

It was fate, and being angry at fate was as futile as being angry at the weather.