Top 100 Bacigalupi Quotes
#1. How did you find truth when everyone was talking about sides?
Paolo Bacigalupi
#2. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. We're so few in comparison to the past, where did all the souls go?
Paolo Bacigalupi
#9. Children playing at war. Children who don't deserve to die, but are too foolish to live.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#10. The surfeit of bad trends pushes me to set my stories in worlds which are often diminished versions of our own present.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#11. Despite everything, he failed to understand the capriciousness of warfare. In his arrogance he thought he could prepare. Such a fool...
Paolo Bacigalupi
#12. But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#14. Tool glanced over his shoulder, looking to see if the girl might have changed her mind, but she was gone. Swallowed up by the land. The Drowned Cities ate its children.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#15. 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
#16. Life is exponential. Two becomes four, becomes ten thousand, becomes a plague.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#17. You cannot bargain with me. My heart is the clock. Find medicine before it ticks dry, and buy your friend's life. Fail and his corpse is all you will find here.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#19. I think the fact that we, as writers, don't engage with resource-level questions is a symptom of our society where we just don't know where our stuff comes from.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#20. They'd blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they'd still blame you.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#21. Tool wondered if the girl was going mad. It happened to people. Sometimes they saw too much and their minds went away. They lost the will to survive. They curled up and surrendered to madness.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#22. Businesses that decide to be reality based and identify where they're vulnerable to climate impact, that start thinking about how to buffer against it, are going to be able to take advantage of shortages. When the water runs out, not everyone is in the same pickle.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#24. She smiles at him, too young to know him for a stranger, and too innocent yet to care.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#25. I suspect that young adults crave stories of broken futures because they themselves are uneasily aware that their world is falling apart.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#26. I think inherently, a little bit, I'm a bit of a pleaser, and I want people to like me and be nice, and to not ruffle feathers and just make everybody happy and stuff. It's a personality flaw.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#27. Hell, we're all bullet bait sooner or later. Doubt it makes much difference. You make it to sixteen, you're a goddamn legend.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Knowledge is always two-edged. For every benefit, there is hazard. For every good, evil.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#32. It's human nature to tear one another apart. Be glad you come from such a successful line of killers.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#33. I think that we live in a highly specialized, technologically advanced society. Highly developed societies tend to have very remote understandings about what underlies our prosperity.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#34. 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
#35. If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#37. Doctor Mahfouz was always yammering on about how everyone had humanity in them. From Mahlia's experience, the doctor was sliding high, but now, as she looked at this sergeant named Ocho, she wondered if there was some bit of softness in this hard scarred boy that she might be able to work.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#38. Food should come from the place of its origin, and stay there. It shouldn't spend its time crisscrossing the globe for the sake of profit.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#39. 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
#40. When somebody keeps telling you, 'This book is amazing,' you sort of have this pleasing instinct to say, 'Oh, let me make you happy again; let me do that trick again.'
Paolo Bacigalupi
#41. Take three different Thai writers and ask them to extrapolate their county's future, and one hopes that you'll get three very different - but all deeply honest - versions.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#42. They say in the military that a good battle plan can last as long as five minutes in real fighting. After that, it comes down to if the general is favored by fate and the spirits.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. You can't know its mind, and you can't control it. This creature is nothing but war incarnate. If you traffic with it, you bring war into your house, and violence down upon yourself.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#46. 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
#47. Knowledge is simply a terrible ocean we must cross, and hope that wisdom lies on the other side.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#48. I'm really interested in how conflicts arise and how they reach points of no return. I'm no pacifist. Sometimes force is necessary. But war is a choice.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#49. 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
#50. Language is how we hack other people's brains. It's how we make them see things the way we want them to see them.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#51. The blood bond was nothing. It was the people that mattered. If they covered your back, and you covered theirs, then maybe that was worth calling family. Everything else was just so much smoke and lies.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#52. 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
#53. People only really live when they're about to die," he said. "Before then it's all a waste. You don't appreciate how good it is until you're really in the shit.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#54. 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
#55. 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
#57. There are parents who are really angry that I decided to portray people who have come into the country illegally as decent human beings.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#58. 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
#59. Your body is full of rage. Every sinew. It is easy to read. You speak volumes with a clenched fist.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#60. 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
#61. I say I write extrapolations. I look at data points and ask what the world could look like.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#62. Debts are a heavy burden. Throw them off, and you walk free.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#63. 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
#64. You think you are some fine predator? A swamp panther or coywolv?" He pretended to inspect her. "Where are your teeth and claws, girl?" He bared his teeth. "Where is your bite?
Paolo Bacigalupi
#65. The young adult category is particularly interesting to me in terms of science fiction and fantasy tropes.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. Killing isn't free. It takes something out of you every time you do it. You get their life; they get a piece of your soul. It's always a trade.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#69. 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
#70. I'm a chess piece. A pawn,' she said. 'I can be sacrificed, but I cannot be captured. To be captured would be the end of the game.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. All the definitions people want to put on you in terms of what kind of writer you are come with hidden meanings. If you're writing science fiction, you're writing rocket ships. If you write dystopian fiction, it's inequity where The Man must be fought.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#75. Belief." He snorted. "I could kiss a thousand crosses. Fucking belief.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#76. When you were alone in the rising ocean, you grabbed whatever raft passed by.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#77. Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#78. I was interested in political failure here in the U.S. The way we're failing to work together to solve even our smallest problems, let alone the complex ones.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#79. 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." He
Paolo Bacigalupi
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. Of course, the more you read, the more you learn, and ultimately there is more information than you can ever use. The difficulty is that as an outsider, you know you're too ignorant for your own good, and so the urge to keep researching and *never* start writing is pretty strong.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#84. What I'm hoping to do though is to ground my extrapolations in specificity, and to make sure that the story I tell is deliberately and honestly told.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#85. Some people had to bleed so other people could drink. Simple as that.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#86. 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
#87. I do not fight battles that cannot be won. Do not confuse that with cowardice.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. When I read, I'm either reading to learn, or I'm reading to switch off.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#92. Novelists want to be published and need a publisher to decide to print 20,000 copies. So you need to entertain on some level. I want to reach out and connect.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#93. As a kid, I always liked reading stories where I had a power-projection fantasy. I wanted to be inside of a story where I had power and influence, was going to rise to power, was going to somehow influence my society.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#94. No one else could see all the bodies she'd left behind, but they were there, looking at her. Or maybe that was just her, looking at herself, and not liking what she saw. Knowing she could never escape her own judging gaze.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#95. For pleasure, I'll read military sf, or Elmore Leonard capers, anything that's fast and fun. Otherwise, I mostly pick at books, without any clear focus.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#96. 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
#97. The loneliest Chinese man I ever met lived halfway up the Three Gorges, in Sichuan Province.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#98. 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
#100. You couldn't live close to war and not have it grab you eventually.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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