John Scalzi Quotes

The recruit was Sam McCain; in one of our lunch sessions I recalled Sarah O’Connell describing him as more mouth than brain. Unsurprisingly, he’d been in sales most of his life.

You are better at small talk than I am. That is not always a compliment.

Many people believe geekdom is defined by a love of a thing, but I think - and my experience of geekdom bears on this thinking - that the true sign of a geek is a delight in sharing a thing. It's the major difference between a geek and a hipster, you know: When a hipster sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say "Oh, crap, now the wrong people like the thing I love." When a geek sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say "ZOMG YOU LOVE WHAT I LOVE COME WITH ME AND LET US LOVE IT TOGETHER."

Look," I said. "Something that needs your attention. Over there. Away from here.

It's Charlie's soul," he repeated. "Or more accurately, it's a holographic representation of the dynamic electrical system that embodies the consciousness of Charles Boutin.

Sometimes I don’t know if my life is complicated, or if it’s that I just think too much about things.

What’s the point of being in charge if you can’t indulge in pointless favoritism.

Rationality is not one of humanity’s strong points.

“I didn’t say that,” Szilard said, in a tone that implied that perhaps he had.

No, it's not fair. You're in the wrong universe for fair.

I'm not insane, sir," I said. "I have a finely calibrated sense of acceptable risk.

Teenagers can be idiotic and stupid, but teenagers also model their behavior from the signals they get from adults.

(T)he idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt. This is most obviously revealed by the fact that in Ayn Rand’s world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he’d be anywhere else.

The failure mode of clever is “asshole.”

I have drinks," Hanson said, coming up behind Duvall.
"Why, Jimmy," Duvall said. "That makes you my new favorite person.