Rudy Rucker Quotes

The surest way to be unhappy is try to be happy all the time.

I'll wish for ten million more bucks while I'm at it."
"And immortality?"
"No, no. I don't want to live forever. Death's the only thing that keeps me going.

Now that's a fib, I know," said the black woman. "Is you folks preachers?

Sybil had an unreal, larger-than-life feeling . . . as if she were a person in a book.

It’s perfect, isn’t it? It just goes to show that everything I’ve ever said about religion is true. The sky’s the limit when it comes to religious stupidity. Here we have a race of alien invaders, and the evangelical true believers are flocking here to get taken over.

I knew you’d say that. You’re so anal, Fletcher. Too much math.

Not only am I scared of big, strong men, I'm scared of mean little women. It's just little skinny men and nice big women that I get along with.

I think of consciousness as a point, an "eye," that moves about in a sort of mental space. All thoughts are already there in this multi-dimensional space, which we might as well call the Mindscape. Our bodies move about in the physical space called the Universe; our consciousnesses move about in the mental space called the Mindscape.

I wished she would go away and let us destroy the universe in peace.

Although my mood swings were the logical and deterministic results of my inputs, they were dismayingly hard for me to foresee, let alone control.

I think computronium is a spurious concept. Matter, just as it is, conducts outlandishly complex chaotic quantum computations by dint of sitting around. Matter isn't dumb. Every particle everywhere and every when computes at the maximum possible flop. I think we tend to very seriously undervalue quotidian reality.
Turning an inhabited planet into a computronium Dyson shell is comparable to filling in wetlands to make a mall, clear-cutting a rain forest to make a destination golf resort, or killing a whale to whittle its teeth into religious icons of a whale god.

Even with omnividence and telepathy, I expect that, day in and day out, people won't actually change that much—not even in a million years. That's a lesson history teaches us. Yes, we've utterly changed our tech since the end of the Middle Ages, but the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch or Peter Bruegel show that people back then were much like us, perennially entangled with the seven deadly sins.

People always have bad news for you when they call you “sir.”

Just as a rock is already in the Universe, whether or not someone is handling it, an idea is already in the Mindscape, whether or not someone is thinking it. A person who does mathematical research, writes stories, or meditates is an explorer of the Mindscape in much the same way that Armstrong, Livingstone, or Cousteau are explorers of the physical features of our Universe. The rocks on the Moon were there before the lunar module landed; and all the possible thoughts are already out there in the Mindscape.
The mind of an individual would seem to be analogous to the room or to the neighborhood in which that person lives. One is never in touch with the whole Universe through one’s physical perceptions, and it is doubtful whether one’s mind is ever able to fill the entire Mindscape.

Amazing, the respect that nuclear weapons bring.