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Talent was not rare the ability to survive having it was.

Neal Stephenson

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Neal Stephenson
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 31
Author
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Camp Annapolis Junction
Neal Town Stephenson
Stephen Bury
Survive
Talent
Ability
Rare

More quotes by Neal Stephenson

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When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.
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Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.
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Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about.
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I think that this vein is close to being mined out already, but I'll say that my knowledge of and talent for linguistics are quite limited and I'm not aware of being a hell of a lot more interested in that topic than I am in others.
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Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds.
Neal Stephenson
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It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.
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It would be quite unusual for me to get deep into a project and then shitcan it. One of the advantages of having done this for a while is that I have a better sense than I used to of when something is or isn't working. Until I developed that sense, this was a pretty dicey career for me, both in terms of paying the rent, and emotional wear and tear.
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One of the problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic horror story. I've lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an ingredients label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time.
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So, you're worried that a pink dragon will fly over the concent and fart nerve gas on us?
Neal Stephenson
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The mind knows...that there is an action principle that governs how the world evolves from one moment to the next - that restricts our world's path to points that tell an internally consistent story.
Neal Stephenson
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I think visual literacy and media literacy is not without value, but I think plain old-fashioned text literacy and mathematical literacy are much more powerful and flexible ways to organize your mind.
Neal Stephenson
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If you sincerely believed in God, how could you form one thought, speak one sentence, without mentioning Him?
Neal Stephenson
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It is the fate of operating systems to become free.
Neal Stephenson
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It is what you don't expect... that most needs looking for.
Neal Stephenson
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How could your cover be blown in Canada? Why even bother going dark there? How could you tell?
Neal Stephenson
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If you are a professional writer - i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed - Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter it simply makes everything else vanish.
Neal Stephenson
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And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.
Neal Stephenson
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I feel that I am entitled to trample all other considerations into the dirt in my pursuit of a satisfying pun.
Neal Stephenson
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She's not afraid. She's wearing a dentata.
Neal Stephenson
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The story is everything, so it always begins with a story.And research is a kind of scaffolding built underneath the story as I go along. My enjoyment level varies, but in general, I'm writing about topics I find interesting, so I can't gripe too much.
Neal Stephenson