Top 100 Paolo Bacigalupi Quotes
#1. When people fight for ideals, no price is too high, and no fight can be surrendered. They aren't fighting for money, or power, or control. Not really. They're fighting to destroy their enemies.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#2. Belief." He snorted. "I could kiss a thousand crosses. Fucking belief.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#3. When I think about myself as a writer, for sure I am a science fiction writer. The tools of extrapolation, the tools of anticipating the future - those are science fictional questions.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#4. Teens want to read something that isn't a lie; we adults wish we could put our heads under the blankets and hide from the scary story we're writing for our kids.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#5. Sometimes when we label something dystopian fiction, I feel like we're trying very hard not to use the words 'science fiction,' because science fiction has those horrible connotations of rocket ships and bodacious babes.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#6. I'm interested in how we react when we're heavily pressed. When we're vulnerable and our survival is in question, how do we behave?
Paolo Bacigalupi
#7. We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your potential fully upon it.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#8. Environmental science is telling us a lot about our future and what it could look like, whether we're talking about global warming (the current poster child for the environment) or a loss of genetic diversity in our food supplies, or the effects of low-dose chemicals on human development.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#9. Debts are a heavy burden. Throw them off, and you walk free.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#10. I say I write extrapolations. I look at data points and ask what the world could look like.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#11. I'm not proud of it, but I'm a great liar when I travel. I smile and lie, and things are smooth.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#12. Your body is full of rage. Every sinew. It is easy to read. You speak volumes with a clenched fist.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#13. Lock it away," the half-man whispered. "You feel, after. Not now. Now you are a soldier. Now you do your duty for your pack. If you break, your Mouse will die, and you with him. Feel, after. Not now.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#15. I have friends who are science journalists, and I'm seeing stories of theirs or talking with them about ideas that they're pitching. Certain kinds of science are around me all the time, like climate change and biology.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#16. The idea made Mahlia's chest tighten. It was her own fantasy, the secret one she sometimes curled up to when she went to bed, knowing that it was stupid, but still wanting it, wanting it to somehow all make sense.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#17. Maybe storytelling belongs in audio - a short story is the length of a commute. That can be a sacred spot where you have the ear of the reader without having to compete with other media like games or TV.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#18. You couldn't live close to war and not have it grab you eventually.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#19. People don't actually stay still, you know - when their area is a disaster, they go somewhere else, right? And that's just a natural human impulse.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#20. The loneliest Chinese man I ever met lived halfway up the Three Gorges, in Sichuan Province.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#21. Save your shaming for the girl, Doctor. If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago." He turned and started wading into the swamp. "Time is passing. I, for one, have no intention of remaining here for your betrayer to bring back the soldiers and their guns.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#22. When I read, I'm either reading to learn, or I'm reading to switch off.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#23. I don't know why we choose to reach out to help another person, or why we decide that we can't, and withdraw and try to care only for ourselves, but I'm fascinated by that choice.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#24. When you were alone in the rising ocean, you grabbed whatever raft passed by.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#26. As far as 'Windup Girl' becoming a hit - none of us expected that. 'Night Shade' was just hoping not to lose their shirts, and I had grown up hearing from everyone that science fiction didn't sell, so all of our expectations were very low.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#27. Some people had to bleed so other people could drink. Simple as that.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#28. I used to work for a newspaper that covered local resource issues, and my coworkers and friends were journalists. Their reporting work was always pretty grim.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#29. Knowing all and having the necessary tools are two different things. This is hardly a hospital. We make do with what we have, and none of that is Mahlia's fault. Tani is the victim of many evils, but Mahlia is not the beginning of that chain, nor the end. I am responsible, if anyone is.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#30. She is an animal. Servile as a dog. And yet if he is careful to make no demands, to leave the air between them open, another version of the windup girl emerges. As precious and rare as a living bo tree. Her soul, emerging from within the strangling strands of her engineered DNA.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#31. Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#32. I think there are narratives going on all the time that we think of as tangential - up until they turn out to be deciding factors in our lives.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#33. I suspect that young adults crave stories of broken futures because they themselves are uneasily aware that their world is falling apart.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#34. She smiles at him, too young to know him for a stranger, and too innocent yet to care.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#36. They'd blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they'd still blame you.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#38. We knew it was all going to go to hell, and we just stood by and watched it happen anyway. There ought to be a prize for that kind of stupidity.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#39. How did you find truth when everyone was talking about sides?
Paolo Bacigalupi
#41. Despite everything, he failed to understand the capriciousness of warfare. In his arrogance he thought he could prepare. Such a fool...
Paolo Bacigalupi
#42. The surfeit of bad trends pushes me to set my stories in worlds which are often diminished versions of our own present.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#43. Death is not defeat, Tool told himself. We all die. Every one of us. Rip and Blade and Fear and all the rest. We all die. So what if you are the last? You were designed to be destroyed.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#44. It only takes a few politicians to stoke division, or a few demagogues encouraging hatred to set your kind upon one another. And then before you know it, you have a whole nation biting on its own tail, going round and round until there is nothing left but the snapping of teeth.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#45. You get worked up about what's right and wrong, but that shit's only in your head. Rules are what the big dogs say they are.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#46. I started really thinking a lot about where does a country go when we stop being able to speak to each other, when a nation stops being able to solve problems because its ideological differences become so deep that it just becomes dysfunctional.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#47. A gamble. Everything was a damn gamble. Betting against luck and the Fates, again and again, and again. She kept walking, waiting for the bullet.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#48. A final stand, then. One last battle. At least he could say that he had fought. When he met his brothers and sisters on the far side of death, he would tell them that he had not yielded. He might have betrayed everything that they had been bred for, but he had never yielded.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#49. I write at a standing desk, which has helped me be much more productive and solved some back problems, but mostly all my quirky habits have to do with procrastination and avoidance rather than with work. I'm slowly trying to stamp those out.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#50. If we don't have the right words in our vocabularies, we can't even see the things that are right in front of our faces.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#51. I'm definitely writing my fears. It's almost therapeutic to at least voice a terror, to say, 'I'm worried that Lake Powell looks low and Lake Mead looks even lower.'
Paolo Bacigalupi
#52. If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#53. I used to love reading, but since I've started writing, it's harder for me to immerse, because I spend so much time looking at how the story is structured and trying to see what the author is doing behind the curtain.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#55. Knowledge is always two-edged. For every benefit, there is hazard. For every good, evil.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#56. She'd been so busy worrying about soldier boys and villagers she'd forgotten the jungle had hunters of its own, and now she was going to die for it.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#57. Short fiction seems more targeted - hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it's a lot smokier and less defined.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#58. If I was strategic, I would have figured out how to get out of this place. Would have seen everything falling apart and got out while there were still ships to sail.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#60. Plenty of people say my guesses about a future drought in the western U.S. (where I live and grew up) are wrong, so I don't see why I won't be wrong in some people's eyes when I go set a story on foreign shores.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#61. If we can't describe our reality accurately, we can't see it.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#62. I focus a little more on pacing when I write books in the young adult category, and of course there's the great American fear of anything sexual, so that's somewhat backed off in YA.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#63. As an author, you're really grateful for the people who are supporting you, but on some other level, that can be a dangerous echo chamber.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#64. It was a view of the world that anticipated evil from people because people always delivered. And the worst part was that she couldn't really argue.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#65. In the distance, a building explodes in flame. She has over a hundred men working this district, letting everyone feel the pain of real enforcement. Laws are a fine thing on paper, but painful when no bribery can ease their bind. People have forgotten this.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#66. The sources and research I use for my inspiration aren't your typical sci-fi subjects, but it's really driven by obsession and personal anxiety more than trying to take up the sword and do what's right.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#67. When we live the 21st-century good life, almost every aspect of it is predicated on not looking at the implications of what we're up to. Happiness at this point has a lot to do with not looking, so you don't feel complicit in some vast and awful enterprise.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#69. I'm particularly interested in black swan events: unprecedented surprises that destroy the conventional wisdom about how the world works.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#70. For a second, Americans could still feel like big swinging dicks. Solidarity, baby.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#71. It is a precise thing, a scripted act as deliberate as Jo No Mai, each move choreographed, a worship of scarcity.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#72. Politics is ugly. Never doubt what small men will do for great power.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#73. Some things, it was better not to think about. It just made you mad and angry.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#74. I never turned children to war," Tool said.
"Only because you fought on the side of wealth,
Paolo Bacigalupi
#75. Maggot twitch, some people called it. If you'd seen much of the war, you had it. Some more. Some less. But everybody had it.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#76. The thought burrowed into her heart as darkness fell. It coiled in her guts as she wedged herself amongst the boughs of a tree to sleep. And in the morning, it woke with her and clung to her back, riding on her shoulders as she climbed down, hungry and exhausted from nightmares.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#77. Their yellow eyes seemed to hold ancient knowledge, as if their memories of want and drought and survival were so much more than Maria's.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#78. The things that have really gotten confusing to me is how you balance the desires of your publishers to produce things on a schedule, and people are always sort of giving you ideas on what you should follow up with or how you should proceed next and things like that.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#79. My conception of my ideal reader has expanded quite a lot as I've matured: Ultimately when I think of my ideal reader, it's someone who's not sitting down with the intention of automatically arguing with the book: somebody who's going to give me enough slack to tell my story.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#80. Pure data. You don't believe data - you test data." He grimaced. "If I could put my finger on the moment we genuinely fucked ourselves, it was the moment we decided that data was something you could use words like believe or disbelieve around.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#82. I know people who have gone into career death spins, and that's something you're always aware of as a writer.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#83. Mahlia knew the many voices of war from her father's chant.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#84. We waste all our money throwing dice, trying to get close to Luck, trying to get the big win ... To help us find something we can keep for ourselves.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#85. Mostly I sat down and said, 'I'm not going to write a boring story.' And that actually, surprisingly, solves most of your problems.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#86. I am interested in agricultural corporations and how they function. The idea that they own the genetics of our food supply is a really compelling thing to me.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#87. I think that, when I think about the future that 'The Water Knife' represents, it's one where there's a lack of oversight, planning and organization.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#88. Economies are embedded inside ecosystems. Companies dependent on tourism, for example, are affected by low rainfall - there's less snow for skiers, and forest fires are more intense.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#89. Laws are a fine thing on paper, but painful when no bribery can ease their bind.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#90. Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way if justice.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#92. Sex and hypocrisy. They go together like coffee and cream.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#94. The marketplace tells us that good, visceral storytelling has a place. But there are lots of questions about the format that stories take.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#97. A wise human would have an understanding of the supply chain and how the pieces fit together. But it's against our nature to think about it.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#98. I didn't think of myself as writing 'cli-fi,' but I'll take the label. I'll take any label that makes someone think they might be interested in my stories.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#99. Watch your mouth," Mahlia said, "or I'll stitch your guts shut.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#100. Mahlia just waited. She was good at that. When you were a castoff, it didn't do any good trying to talk to people, but sometimes, if you just kind of waited them out, people would get uncomfortable and feel like they had to do something.
Paolo Bacigalupi
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
