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Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson Quotes

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Famous Neal Stephenson Quotes

“Any strategy that involves crossing a valley accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.”

WorldDoneBigsStuffTermLossAcceptingHigherDemandGainsStrategyDistanceCelebrateHillsValleysTolerateShort TermCrossingsHaltStagnationBig Stuff
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“At the beginning of the project, I wasn't certain that I could come up with an engaging storyline and cast of characters in this world, so I had a strong bias toward actually writing, and worrying about research later. In other words, I was afraid that I'd devote a year or two of my life to grinding through Kant and Husserl, then discover that there simply was no novel to be written here.”

WorldWritingYearsTwoCharacterCertainStrongWorryNovelWrittenThis WorldProjectsResearchCastsCome UpBiasEngagingStoryline
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“But I'm not a small-literary-novel kind of guy, and once I'd developed the world in the first couple of hundred pages, I felt that there was potential here to go on and write an engaging story set in that world. So that's what I did. This probably ruins things both for the people who want small literary novels and for those who want action-packed epics, but anyway, it's what I wrote.”

PeopleWorldWantWritingFirstsKindStoriesActionGuyFeltNovelGoes OnCouplePagesHundredRuinsEpicEngaging
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“Early on, I settled on the first-person strategy as a way to deal with exposition and world-description issues. As long as the book is, it could have been far longer had I gone with an omniscient third-person narrator, or multiple point-of-view characters, since either of those would have enabled me to impart much more detailed information about the history and geography of the world.”

WorldWayFirstsPersonsLongHas BeensBookCharacterViewsDealsGoneIssuesInformationThirdsStrategyPoint Of ViewDescriptionMultipleCould Have BeenGeographyFirst PersonImpartNarratorsOmniscientThird Person
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“What writers of fantasy, science fiction, and much historical fiction do for a living is different from what writers of so-called literary or other kinds of fiction do. The name of the game in F/SF/HF is creating fictional worlds and then telling particular stories set in those worlds. If you're doing it right, then the reader, coming to the end of the story, will say, "Hey, wait a minute, there are so many other stories that could be told in this universe!" And that's how we get the sprawling, coherent fictional universes that fandom is all about.”

IfsWorldKindDifferentEndsStoriesUniverseGamesNamesWaitingFictionFantasyMinutesParticularReaderCreatingScience FictionHistoricalHeyHistorical FictionFandomsFictional Worlds
Author:Neal Stephenson
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“..this is just like life must be for about 99 percent of the people in the world. You're in this place. There's other people all around you, but they don't understand you and you don't understand them, but people do a lot of pointless babbling anyway. In order to stay alive, you have to spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way to get out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again.”

PeopleWorldWayOrderCuttingAliveHeardStupidPercentQuittingWickedMeaninglessPointlessStaying AliveBabblingFlyersWicked World
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“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.”

IfsThinkingMenWorldYearsArtStillsRealHardFiveStreetsCrimeCircumstancesDrugTenDiseaseMy FamilyTwentiesMovedChinaRevengeMartial ArtsDevotedDealerTwenty FiveMonasteriesDrug DealersBeing BadWiping Out
Author:Neal Stephenson
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