Ian McDonald Quotes

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

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

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

How proud he would have felt [...] to have seen those seeds germinate into a Muslim nation, a Land of the Pure. How it would have broken his heart to see that Land of the Pure become a medieval theocracy and then rip itself apart in tribal factionalism. The Word of God prophecies from the barrel of an AK47.

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.

Ayşe Erkoç learned long ago that the secret of doing anything illicit in Istanbul is to do it in full public gaze in the clear light of day. No one ever questions the legitimacy of the blatant.

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

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.

“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?

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

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

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

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

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.

At some point it will inevitably crash again: as weapons of mass destruction go, unrestricted market economies are among the more subtle but sure.