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Neal Stephenson

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Famous Neal Stephenson Quotes

“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.”

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Author:Neal Stephenson
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“Coming up with lectures is a huge amount of work. I was willing to do one lecture for Gresham because I was honored to have been invited, but to create lectures for a class would probably require that I shut down everything else and concentrate on lectures for a couple of years. Then there would be many, many other skills that I'd have to learn, such as how to sit through a faculty meeting, how to deal with students, etc. It is really not in the cards for me. It's not who I am or what I do. I'm a novelist.”

YearsHas BeensWould BeDealsClassStudentsWillingHugeAmountCoupleSkillsMeetingsWho I AmCardsNovelistsEtcFacultyHonoredInvitedLectures
Author:Neal Stephenson
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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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“An old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market.”

PeopleYearsLittlesGoneObjectsAuthoritySixBuiltTownsEdgesSellingDestroyedShirtsElsewhereDevotedT ShirtSix Year Olds
Book:Anathem
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“Hiro is a talented drifter. This is the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him as recently as five years ago. But in the bleak light of full adulthood, which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed.”

YearsKindLightNightMorningFiveAmountYears AgoTwentiesLifestyleBrokeFive YearsSundayAdulthoodSaturdayUnemployedSaturday NightBleakSunday MorningDrifters
Book:Snow Crash
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