Quote

Jad said, The leakage was forcing choices, the making of which in no way improved matters. Okay. So we were, in effect, locked in a room with a madman sorcerer. That clarified things a little.

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
Rooms
Madmen
Choices
Improved
Making
Locked
Littles
Effect
Leakage
Little
Matters
Sorcerer
Matter
Okay
Clarified
Way
Effects
Madman
Things
Room
Forcing

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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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Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
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If you sincerely believed in God, how could you form one thought, speak one sentence, without mentioning Him?
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As convenient as it is for information to come to us, libraries do have a valuable side effect: they force all of the smart people to come together in one place where they can interact with one another.
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The difference between stupid and intelligent people - and this is true whether or not they are well-educated - is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.
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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.
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When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.
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Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs, I said. We have a protractor.
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I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.
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If the item of stolen property had been anything other than a book, it would have been confiscated. But a book is different - it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society.
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Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.
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You don't want your readers seeing easy connections it becomes a distraction.
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Hiro is a talented drifter. This is the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him as recently as five years ago. But in the bleak light of full adulthood, which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed.
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...your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.
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Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.
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Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat.
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A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.
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Any strategy that involves crossing a valley accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.
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It is commonly the case with technologies that you can get the best insight about how they work by watching them fail.
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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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