Greg Egan Quotes

#1. Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I've been led astray like that myself at times.

Greg Egan

#2. Isn't that what the Peerless is for? Anything too difficult for the home world?

Greg Egan

#3. Let me understand you. Let me piece you together, hold you together. Let me help you to explain yourself.

Greg Egan

#4. We have a special name, here, for a certain kind of failure to defer to the greater good - for putting a personal sense of doing right above any objective measure of the outcome. It's called 'moral vanity'.

Greg Egan

#5. A recent survey of 2,000 male graduates of Harvard Business School
found that penis length & IQ were equally good predictors of annual
income.
from Eugene

Greg Egan

#6. Evolution was a random walk across a minefield, not a pre-ordained trajectory, onward and upward toward perfection.

Greg Egan

#7. Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything. Still,

Greg Egan

#8. For there is a truth which cannot be bought or sold, imposed by force, resisted or escaped.

Greg Egan

#9. Order my life. I'm nothing without you: fragments of time, fragments of words, fragments of feelings. Make sense of me. Make me whole.

Greg Egan

#10. I don't have any structured grand plan; I just intend to keep writing about the things that interest me-some of which change, some of which don't.

Greg Egan

#11. You know my position. We need to come back in force and deal with this sickness once and for all: occupy the city, impose our own laws, harvest every noxious plant and burn it. It

Greg Egan

#12. Fandom is about fandom, it's a great big social club.

Greg Egan

#13. How does it feel to be seven thousand years old?"
"That depends."
"On what?"
"On how I want to feel.

Greg Egan

#14. I hope you theorists know what you're doing.' 'I can assure you that we don't. The geometry is still beyond us. All I learnt in the void was that our best guess so far is certainly wrong.

Greg Egan

#15. How do you know which parts of the world are you, in the polises?' 'Are there citizens in Konishi who eat music?' 'Is not having a body like falling all the time, without moving?

Greg Egan

#16. Who exactly am I saving from shame, when I'll live and die in every possible way?

Greg Egan

#17. It was like listening to two badly written computer programs trying to convince each other that they were sentient.

Greg Egan

#18. No one objects to the notion that every technological civilisation might undergo its own Introdus.

Greg Egan

#19. On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed.

Greg Egan

#20. As he walked past shops and teahouses he could still

Greg Egan

#21. I'm rarely grabbed by anything the way I was when I was 10 years younger. About the only relatively new artists whose albums I own are Beck, and They Might Be Giants.

Greg Egan

#22. Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century.

Greg Egan

#23. Mathematics catalogues everything that is not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics is an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders.

Greg Egan

#24. They floated for a while, two flesher-shaped creatures and a giant worm in a cloud of spinning metal fragments, an absurd collection of imaginary debris, glinting by the light of the true stars.

Greg Egan

#25. If I'd said that to my sensible, smutty, twelve-year-old self, he would have laughed until he hemorrhaged

Greg Egan

#26. The Universe may be stranger than we can imagine, but it's going to have a tough time outdoing Egan.

Greg Egan

#27. You have to be doubly foolish to be a Satanist," Stoney muttered.
"Doubly?"
"Not only do you need to believe all the nonsense of Christian theology, you then have to turn around and back the preordained, guaranteed-to-fail, absolutely futile losing side.

Greg Egan

#28. You know, in formal logic, an inconsistent set of axioms can be used to prove anything at all. Once you have a single contradiction, A and not A, there's nothing you can't derive from it.

Greg Egan

#29. He was a bridger. He created you to touch other cultures. He wanted you to reach as far as you could.

Greg Egan

#30. walked a few paces away from her, then turned his whole body towards the south; in this flat desert, it wasn't impractical to triple his axial span. He

Greg Egan

#31. Would I have been happier? Maybe. But then, happiness was overrated.

Greg Egan

#32. If you want to make it human, make it whole.

Greg Egan

#33. I hadn't given much thought to the prospect of a Hugo nomination at the time it happened, but obviously once you're nominated, winning one seems a bit less far-fetched than before.

Greg Egan

#34. It was still the pre-eminent social networking site for the 0-3 age group

Greg Egan

#35. Being rewarded for anything other than the quality of their work is the fastest way to screw-up a writer-and it isn't only new ones who suffer from that.

Greg Egan

#36. Parantham finally realized that selecting a star on the map enabled a sub-menu with the unassuming option "Go to star". Choosing this did not change the map's viewpoint or magnification; rather, it caused the map to inquire politely, "Are you sure you wish to travel to this star?

Greg Egan

#37. We've been half right about a lot of things, but there's something missing from our theories, something whose nature we haven't even guessed yet. If we don't learn to understand it, it will kill us.

Greg Egan

#38. I admire David Lynch so much, and I think he made some bad decisions with Lost Highway.

Greg Egan

#39. There's nothing worse than a label to cement people's loyalties.

Greg Egan

#40. Death never gave meaning to life: it was always the other way round.

Greg Egan

#41. Because sex, drugs, and religion all hinge on the same kind of simple neurochemical events: addictive, euphoric, exhilirating - and all, equally, meaningless.

Greg Egan

#42. A computer model which manipulated data about itself and its "surroundings" in essentially the same way as an organic brain would have to possess essentially the same mental states. "Simulated consciousness" was as oxymoronic as "simulated addition.

Greg Egan

#43. What am I? The data? The process that generates it? The relationships between the numbers?

Greg Egan

#44. I said, 'The truth is whatever you can get away with.' 'No, that's journalism. The truth is whatever you can't escape.

Greg Egan

#45. I think new writers everywhere need opportunities to get published.

Greg Egan

#46. You know what they say the modern version of Pascal's Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God.

Greg Egan

#47. Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.

Greg Egan

#48. This was her last chance at the closest thing to freedom: her will, her actions, and the outcome in the world could all be in harmony.

Greg Egan

#49. Only the promise of eternal growth made sense of eternal life. Kate

Greg Egan

#50. I've supported myself by writing since 1992, and I'm probably very nearly unemployable by now because employers are likely to be put off by the long gap.

Greg Egan

#51. A story in Asimov's is read by hundreds of thousands of people.

Greg Egan

#52. The reason there was no name for such distant relatives was because sane people would have no interest in distinguishing them from anyone else. "Once

Greg Egan

#53. A matter of pragmatism; chemically knocking someone senseless is usually quieter, less messy and less risky to the assailant than killing them.

Greg Egan

#54. No wonder most fleshers had stampeded into the polises, once they had the chance: if disease and aging weren't reason enough, there was gravity, friction, and inertia. The physical world was one vast, tangled obstacle course of pointless, arbitrary restrictions.

Greg Egan

#55. When everyone had backups of themselves scattered around the galaxy, it required a
vastly disproportionate effort to inconvenience someone, let alone kill them.

Greg Egan

#56. Everyone here would die for the sake of truth. Everyone here lies constantly for the tiniest chance of personal gain. This is what it means to be a scientist.

Greg Egan

#57. If you'd managed to force it open, you would have made a direct path between the interior of the Peerless and the void, which is something we try to discourage.

Greg Egan

#58. Detective Segel, the evidence shows that you experienced a penile erection when the defendant opened fire. Would you describe that as an appropriate response?

Greg Egan

#59. He turned back to face them. 'I do make sense to you, don't I? I'm not just imagining that communication is taking place?

Greg Egan

#60. I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.

Greg Egan

#61. Is a stranger in a crowd less than human, just because you can't witness her inner life?

Greg Egan

#62. If Zendegi was a frivolous indulgence, well, it was there alongside every other beautiful, forbidden thing that her contemporaries have risked their lives to regain

Greg Egan

#63. If we spend all our time gazing at the wonders ahead without remembering where we're standing right now, we're going to trip and fall flat on our face, over and over agaain.

Greg Egan

#64. All we can ever know about are the portraits of each other inside our own skulls.

Greg Egan

#65. Don't underestimate the need to appeal to people's imaginations. Maybe you can see all the consequences of your work, already. Other people might need to have them spelled out explicitly. Maria

Greg Egan

#66. I was matter, like everything else. I could feel the slow decay of my body, the absolute certainty of death. Every heartbeat spelt out a new proof of mortality. Every moment was a premature burial.

Greg Egan

#67. That's all I am, now. That's all that defines me. So when they're happy, they'll be me.

Greg Egan

#68. I've been taking longer to write stories lately.

Greg Egan

#69. Rakesh said, 'What do the Aloof think we can do with this, that they can't do themselves?' 'Give a damn?' Parantham suggested.

Greg Egan

#70. Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.

Greg Egan

#71. We learn precisely enough to keep us from wanting to know any more

Greg Egan

#72. Often when she thought she was reading his body

Greg Egan

#73. The physical world was one vast, tangled obstacle course of pointless, arbitrary restrictions. We'd

Greg Egan

#74. I was recruited by the dead,' Zak said. 'Not in any rush to join them in their silence, but from the urgent need to understand what they might have thought and done that could survive them, that could speak across the ages, that could be continued even now.

Greg Egan

#75. Australian SF book publishing has undergone a boom recently, and sometimes it's easier for new writers to sell a book to a local publisher first, which then makes a US edition more likely.

Greg Egan

#76. There was no truth in anything he said, anything he believed. It was all just an expression of his own needs.

Greg Egan

#77. It all adds up to normality.

Greg Egan

#78. He'd never been lectured on Darwinism in any brothel back home, but then what could he expect in a country run by godless socialists?

Greg Egan