Ian McDonald Quotes

I've always found that the root of a computer problem is human frailty

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.

Legends should stay legends; otherwise they just become history, when the natural course of things is the other way around, from history to legend.

She knew what she was now. She had a purpose. Freedom was still hers, but it was a purposeful freedom. She would seek responsibility, for freedom without responsibility was worthless, and to that duality she would add power, for responsibility without power was impotence. She would go to Wisdom and enthrone the trinity of liberties within herself.

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.

I do not trust the memory. Imaginings too easily become memories, memories imaginings.

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

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

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

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.

“Hey!” the people cried in their dreams. “Give us back our ghosts!” for ghosts are as much a part of a community as its plumbing or its library, for how can a community be without its memories?

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

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

Economics is the most human of sciences. It is the science of wants and frustrations. It is psychology subject to the abstract, amplifying forces of mathematics.

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