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Everybody uses pop culture as a shorthand. You might make an obscure reference to Monty Python or Iron Eagle that only some people will get, but if they do it conveys a world of meaning.

Ernest Cline

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Ernest Cline
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: March 29
Blogger
Comedian
Journalist
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Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Ashland
Ohio
Ernest Christy Cline
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More quotes by Ernest Cline

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My characters are all kind of geek archetypes of people I've encountered at gaming and comic book conventions.
Ernest Cline
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I watched a lot of YouTube videos of cute geeky girls playing '80s cover tunes on ukuleles. Technically, this wasn't part of my research, but I had a serious cute-geeky-girls-playing-ukuleles fetish that I can neither explain nor defend.
Ernest Cline
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One person can keep a secret, but not two.
Ernest Cline
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A river of words flowed between us.
Ernest Cline
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I burned through all of my extra lives in a matter of minutes, and my two least-favorite words appeared on the screen: GAME OVER.
Ernest Cline
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I was 7 years old when the '80s began and 17 years old when they ended, so it was an incredibly formative decade for me.
Ernest Cline
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I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.
Ernest Cline
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I've retroactively made all that wasted time rotting my brain into research. It makes me a hypocrite when I try to tell my own daughter, I don't know, I think we've played a little too much Mario.
Ernest Cline
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As far as my house, I have a ton of video games and three or four old consoles.
Ernest Cline
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Continue your quest by taking the test. Yes, but what test? What test was I supposed to take? The Kobayashi Maru? The Pepsi Challenge? Could the clue have been any more vague?
Ernest Cline
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...now that everyone could vote from home, via the OASIS, the only people who could get elected were movie stars, reality TV personalities, or radical televangelists.
Ernest Cline
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Whenever I saw the sun, I reminded myself that I was looking at a star. One of over a hundred billion in our galaxy. A galaxy that was just one of billions of other galaxies in the observable universe. This helped me keep things in perspective.
Ernest Cline
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I've never really collected anything other than old Atari cartridges. I only had, like, 12 Atari games as a kid, so at some point in my 20s I decided I was going to own all of them.
Ernest Cline
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Lights, I said softly. This had become my favorite word over the past week. In my mind, it had become synonymous with freedom.
Ernest Cline
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I was watching a collection of vintage '80s cereal commercials when I paused to wonder why cereal manufacturers no longer included toy prizes inside every box. It was a tragedy, in my opinion. Another sign that civilization was going straight down the tubes.
Ernest Cline
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I notice when I'm at a party where I don't know anybody - even if I have nothing in common with somebody - we can still talk because we were raised by the same TV and cartoons and movies.
Ernest Cline
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Virtual sex, no matter how realistic, was really nothing but glorified, computer-assisted masturbation.
Ernest Cline
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I never ran out of ammo, because each time I fired a round, a new round was teleported into the bottom of the clip. My bullet bill this month was going to be huge.
Ernest Cline
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I felt like a kid standing in the world's greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play.
Ernest Cline
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I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn't know how to connect with the people there.
Ernest Cline