Top 100 Scalzi Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Scalzi

#1. John Scalzi is a fresh and appealing new voice, and Old Man's War is classic SF seen from a modern perspective - a fast-paced tour of a daunting, hostile universe.

Robert Charles Wilson

#2. I have seen John Scalzi's pose-off picture. There are no words. There is only inarticulate whimpering.

Jim C. Hines

#3. That's a distinction that's going to make a lot of difference to the ninety percent of humanity that doesn't know the difference between astrology and astronomy,

John Scalzi

#4. I both love and am terrified by Greg Van Eekhout's vision of Los Angeles. I already want to go back.

John Scalzi

#5. I'm a monster. You're a monster. We're all fucking inhuman monsters, and we don't see a damned thing wrong with it.

John Scalzi

#6. Attempting to use a biological agent against your enemy while avoiding its effects on you is like trying to use a grenade by holding onto it and hoping all the shrapnel flies in the direction of the person you want to kill.

John Scalzi

#7. Ensign Davis thought, Screw this, I want to live, and swerved to avoid the land worms. But then he tripped and one of the land worms ate his face and he died anyway.

John Scalzi

#8. I thought this was a matter of some urgency, Harry." "It is," I said. "But I fell from the sky today. I could use a couple of waffles.

John Scalzi

#9. No matter what, the Earth is fucked," Rigney said. "Excuse the language, but that's the gist of what I'm hearing from you.

John Scalzi

#10. I propose a toast. Here's to being right all the time. May God and history forgive us. They all clinked glasses to that.

John Scalzi

#11. We don't get to choose our battles.

John Scalzi

#12. I'm sorry," the groundskeeper said. "Usually the kharhn we feed to the kingsflower are already dead. I never get to see anything live fed to it. This is exciting for me.

John Scalzi

#13. How do you like your peace now, motherfucker?

John Scalzi

#14. I mean that you and I know that in this universe, God is a hack," he said. "He's a writer on an awful science fiction television show, and He can't plot His way out of a box. How do you have faith when you know that?

John Scalzi

#15. Occam's razor theory of combat: The simplest way of kicking someone's ass was usually the correct one.

John Scalzi

#16. We're in the wrong universe for fair.

John Scalzi

#17. There's a saying: "May you live in interesting times." To begin, it's a curse. "Interesting" in this case uniformly means "Oh god, death is raining down upon us and we shall all perish wailing and possibly on fire.

John Scalzi

#18. Well, isn't that just like religion for you, Archie," he said. "One day it's a nice way to spend your weekends and the next you're in the middle of a righteous theological clusterfuck.

John Scalzi

#19. And of course, just like in the movies, as soon as you mention that life is good, that means something needs to come by and sqaut one out on your life.

John Scalzi

#20. I could not personally care less about whether JT Leroy turns out to be fictional or not. I find fictional people writing fiction no more or less objectionable than real people writing fiction, because it's fiction,

John Scalzi

#21. (Obin: "it," not "he" or "she." Because they're hermaphrodites. That means male and female sex organs. Go ahead and have your giggle. I'll wait. Okay, done? Good.)

John Scalzi

#22. This would require an e-book reader that is as easy to read as a traditional book, durable to abuse as much as we abuse paperbacks and cheap enough that when you lose it, you can buy another one

John Scalzi

#23. Well, I'm sorry my telling the truth about the stupid things you do is inconvenient for you,

John Scalzi

#24. If they can work out the kinks, it could revolutionize space travel." " 'Work out the kinks'?" Jared said. "I'm about to use this thing. Kinks are bad.

John Scalzi

#25. She was my friend. Briefly, she was my lover. She was braver than I ever would have been in the moment of death. And I bet she was a hell of a shooting star.

John Scalzi

#26. With sentences, shorter is better than longer:

John Scalzi

#27. I can describe to you the taste of government cheese.

John Scalzi

#28. I'm a seething cauldron of disconnected rage on the inside, Lieutenant." "Ah, repression," Keyes said. "Excellent. Try to avoid taking a potshot at me when you finally blow, please." "I can't promise anything, sir," Alan said.

John Scalzi

#29. Did she tell you I set puppies on fire, too?" Vann asked. "She did not," I said. "It may have been implied.

John Scalzi

#30. The recruiting office was a small storefront in a nondescript strip mall; there was a state liquor authority store on one side of it and a tattoo parlor on the other. Depending on what order you went into each, you could wake up the next morning in some serious trouble.

John Scalzi

#31. Get off my planet, you son of a bitch.

John Scalzi

#32. When I'm writing a novel or doing other serious writing work, I do it on a schedule that dictates writing either 2,000 words a day or writing until noon. After I hit whichever mark comes first, then I can give my attention to everything else I have to do.

John Scalzi

#33. Either every member of your pure race of human dies, or every human dies. And, well ... you know how mongrels think, Mr. Smyrt. They have no appreciation for the perfection of purity.

John Scalzi

#34. It was interesting what you could do, when your enemy was officially your ally. And unaware you knew it was your enemy.

John Scalzi

#35. Is it good? It ain't Shakespeare, but then, Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus, so you tell me.

John Scalzi

#36. Captain Sophia Coloma looked every inch of what she was, which was the sort of person who was not here to put up with your shit.

John Scalzi

#37. How did you get here, anyway?" "It's classified." "I'm close enough to stab you with a fork.

John Scalzi

#38. If someone is telling you to live in interesting times, they are basically telling you they want you to die horribly, and to suffer terribly before you do. Seriously, they are not your friend. This is a tip I am giving you for free.

John Scalzi

#39. Only Norway regularly sends colonists from Europe, and we all know of that country's ecological disasters.

John Scalzi

#40. As a general rule when it's a city bus versus any biological creature, it's safe to bet on the bus.

John Scalzi

#41. Hickory clicked something to Dickory in their native tongue; Dickory clicked back. Hickory responded, and Dickory replied, it seemed a bit forcefully. And then, God help me, Hickory actually sighed.

John Scalzi

#42. Dirk Moeller didn't know if he could fart his way into a major diplomatic incident. But he was ready to find out.

John Scalzi

#43. It's not that Seaborg disliked Harvey, but after a couple of combat drops with the 2nd Platoon one got the sense that if you didn't like things to explode unnecessarily around you, you would want to stay well clear of Daniel Harvey.

John Scalzi

#44. There aren't a lot of humans who speak more than one dialect of Forshan. I know all four of the major ones.'

'Impressive,' Duvall Said.

'I'm good with my tongue,' Dahl said.

'Now who's being forward?' Duvall asked.

John Scalzi

#45. Praise is always a good thing, especially in a crisis.

John Scalzi

#46. The failure mode of clever is "asshole.

John Scalzi

#47. Making peace is often a simple thing, but simple isn't the same thing as easy.

John Scalzi

#48. I find it difficult to believe that Redditors don't understand that anonymity online is merely a facade; indeed, it's probably one of the reasons that revealing the identity of pseudonymous Redditors is looked on as such a huge betrayal.

John Scalzi

#49. It takes a certain kind of dog to willingly demote himself from alpha dog, and that dog was Carl. Holloway would have to speak to him about it, for what little good it would do, Carl being a dog and all.

John Scalzi

#50. We buy time where we may." "You bought yourself time," Oi agreed. "I don't think it's of very good quality.

John Scalzi

#51. One of Harvey's guiding lights in terms of strategies was simplicity; all things being equal, Harvey preferred the course of action that let him get into the middle of things and then just buckle down.

John Scalzi

#52. People are worried about their bodies. They're worried about disease. They're worried about how they are able to get out and participate in the world.

John Scalzi

#53. Humor is rare in science fiction ... there's so little of it that it automatically reminds you of other heroes with that acerbic humor when you find it.

John Scalzi

#54. You'll notice that the Intrepid's inertial dampeners don't work as well in crisis situations, Dahl remembered Jenkins telling them. The ship could do hairpin turns and loop-de-loops any other time and you'd never notice. But whenever there's a dramatic event, there goes your footing.

John Scalzi

#55. Now What?" Kerensky said. "We wait," Dahl said. "For how long?" Kerensky said, " As long as dramatically appropriate," Dahl said.

John Scalzi

#56. Yes, he's an equal opportunity asshole," Szilard said. "And he's aware of it, which he thinks means it's okay.

John Scalzi

#57. What is competent writing? Competent writing is writing that efficiently describes ideas and concepts to an audience, using a grammar that the audience can understand.

John Scalzi

#58. He decided he'd rather die as a fundamentally decent human being than live as the sort of asshole who'd tear out someone's liver to get into an escape pod.

John Scalzi

#59. It's not exactly surprising that staying sane is useful when trying to hit performance markers.

John Scalzi

#60. Moeller also immediately discounted insults about competence, as the incompetent never question their competence about anything.

John Scalzi

#61. When you're a kid all you want to do is be somewhere else.

John Scalzi

#62. Are we there yet?" I asked Joshua. "No," Joshua said. "Are we there yet?" I said. "No." "Are we there yet?" "No." "Are we there yet?" "Yes," Joshua said. "Stop the car.

John Scalzi

#63. I want to be there when you question him." "No you don't." "I really do." "Let me put it another way, Lord Marce. Fuck you, go away.

John Scalzi

#64. Making people change because you can't deal with who they are isn't how it's supposed to be done. What needs to be done is for people to pull their heads out of their asses. You say 'cure.' I hear 'you're not human enough.

John Scalzi

#65. You can be happy anywhere, if you have the right point of view. And the ability to ignore the smell of an entire planet.

John Scalzi

#66. I opened the door for him; he took off like a furry heat-seeking slobber missile.

John Scalzi

#67. I don't think we're at the point where most people are willing to get rid of body parts and replace them, but then again, people who shoot lasers in their eyes come out with better-than-perfect vision.

John Scalzi

#68. Listen to me or don't. But if you don't, you'll be dead. And then where will you be? Dead, that's where.

John Scalzi

#69. What we need to do, as writers, is find out where our market is and adapt to it. I'm not saying that you follow every trend slavishly, but what you see is that, if there is a sea-change in the way that things are being done, then you account for it.

John Scalzi

#70. Who are you, who is so wise in the way of alien fungus?

John Scalzi

#71. I would say I'm a medium-sized 'Star Trek' fan. I love the universe that it's created.

John Scalzi

#72. The assumption that simple = stupid. But it's not true; indeed, I find from personal experience that the stupidest writers are the ones whose writing is positively baroque in form.

John Scalzi

#73. The reality is more complicated, but as with most humans, the people on Earth prefer the simple answer.

John Scalzi

#74. My characters were ... rebelling against something ... My own bad writing. I wouldn't do for my characters what they needed for me to do - be courageous enough in my writing to make them interesting.

John Scalzi

#75. But define 'completely ridiculous shit,'" Duvall said. "Does space travel count? Contact with alien races? Does quantum physics count? Because I don't understand that crap at all. As far as I'm concerned, quantum physics could have been written by a hack.

John Scalzi

#76. Is it painful?" the groundskeeper asked. "I am asking for science.

John Scalzi

#77. Sometimes in life you're going to win and sometimes you're going to lose. But just because you lose doesn't mean the other guy needs to win.

John Scalzi

#78. Whether you're an extra or the hero, this story is about to end. When it's done, whatever you want to be will be up to you and only you. It will happen away from the eyes of any audience and from the hand of any writer. You will be your own man.

John Scalzi

#79. Look," he said. "We'd like you to return the salary." "Oh, is that all?" I said. "Heck. That's easy. The answer is no." "What?" "No." "No?" "What part of that two-letter word don't you understand, Brad?" I asked. "Was it the vowel that threw you, or the consonant ?

John Scalzi

#80. Yes, death by away team. Very effective on this ship, Jenkins said.

John Scalzi

#81. I don't care whether I really exist or don't, whether I'm real or fictional. What I want right now is to be the person who decides my own fate.

John Scalzi

#82. Apparently you don't have to understand physics to protest.

John Scalzi

#83. In all of the history of professional sports, the Cubs are the ultimate symbol of complete failure.

John Scalzi

#84. If knew you were going to drug me, kidnap me, and take me back to the dark ages with out my pants, I never would have slept with you.

John Scalzi

#85. I have no idea, Jim," Lowen said. "I'm a doctor, not a private investigator.

John Scalzi

#86. What's messed up here isn't that this guy thinks we're on a television show. What's messed up here is that as far as I can tell, at this point, it's the most rational explanation for what's going on.

John Scalzi

#87. words themselves are action; they do not simply describe the world but in a very real sense make the world. Therefore it makes sense to pay attention to the worlds people are attempting to create in their words.

John Scalzi

#88. Libertarians secretly worried that ultimately someone will figure out the whole of their political philosophy boils down to 'get off my property.' News flash: This is not really a big secret to the rest of us.

John Scalzi

#89. Now if you'll excuse me, gentlemen, I need to play Russian roulette with our planet's future with the bullet you've so thoughtfully provided. I hope you don't mind if I don't see you out.

John Scalzi

#90. Who are you and what medications aren't you taking? Finn said.

John Scalzi

#91. There's a difference between the fact that the universe is inherently unfair on a cosmic level, and the fact that life is unfair because people are actively making it so.

John Scalzi

#92. Imagine waking up and finding your first and last view of the world was a shotgun barrel. That'd be a hell of a life.

John Scalzi

#93. Some planets evolved genetic structures roughly similar to Earth's, incorporating some if not all the nucleotides involved in terrestrial genetics (perhaps not coincidentally, the intelligent species of these planets have been known to consume humans from time to time;

John Scalzi

#94. The Fflict recognized five genders: male, female, zhial, yal, and neuter. Aul was zhial, and ze liked zis pronouns accurately stated. I would too, in zis position.

John Scalzi

#95. Pope was aware there were other ways to get more diplomatic respect than bigger guns, of course. But while other diplomatic maneuvers sometimes worked and sometimes didn't, ultimately a big damn gun always commanded respect.

John Scalzi