Richard Dooling Quotes

#1. Under Medicare right now, I get paid to put a pacemaker in you, but I don't get paid to counsel you about end-of-life care.

Richard Dooling

#2. I'm always working. I don't really set limits. I tend to go in bursts. And in between, I'm doing my taxes, answering the phone, and all those kinds of things. I waste a lot of time. Computers take a lot of time. I love computers.

Richard Dooling

#3. As the financial experts all over the world use machines to unwind Gordian knots of financial arrangements so complex that only machines can make - 'derive' - and trade them, we have to wonder: Are we living in a bad sci-fi movie? Is the Matrix made of credit default swaps?

Richard Dooling

#4. Why can't you summon a command line and search your real-world home for 'Honda car keys,' and specify rooms in your house to search instead of folders or paths in your computer's home directory? It's a crippling design flaw in the real-world interface.

Richard Dooling

#5. I begin every novel with the vow that I will not write about technology, Catholicism, or Hell. As you know, I end up writing about all three. They just happen to be personal obsessions of mine.

Richard Dooling

#6. As a society, we pick words that are offensive based on what we're most afraid of. We associate sounds with some dangerous idea, and right now the most dangerous thing to us are the differences between us.

Richard Dooling

#7. Let's take care of mothers and infants first, and then let's see what's left over for everybody over 50. I'm over 50. If I get sick, I would rather have money spent on children before it's spent on me.

Richard Dooling

#8. Deep down I knew that if Hell existed, it was a real place full of ruthless, venal people, like the commodity pits at the Chicago Board of Trade, Disney World, or oral arguments before the United States Supreme Court.

Richard Dooling

#9. We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.

Richard Dooling

#10. Criminal court is where bad people are on their best behavior. It's much more dangerous for lawyers and judges in family court, where good people are at their worst.

Richard Dooling

#11. I don't think people should be able to swear whenever they want. I just don't want the federal government making laws about swearing. We should trust people's own instincts about what is appropriate in any given situation.

Richard Dooling

#12. Man is a fire-stealing animal, and we can't help building machines and machine intelligences, even if, from time to time, we use them not only to outsmart ourselves but to bring us right up to the doorstep of Doom.

Richard Dooling

#13. Making money, it seems, is all about the velocity of moving it around, so that it can exist in Hong Kong one moment and Wall Street a split second later.

Richard Dooling

#14. I always wanted to be a writer ... 'Critical Care' was my first published work. I was 34 when it came out. I was accumulating 'Critical Care' for years. I would go for a whole year and not touch it. And then I'd go back to it.

Richard Dooling