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When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.

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
Possession
Handle
Winning
Always
Men
Sword
Wins
Wrestling

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Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion? Juanita shrugs. What's the difference?
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The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future it's an awareness that this is different.
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Am I a technocrat? Im just a guy who went down to the bookstore and bought a couple of textbooks on TCP/IP, which is the underlying protocol of the Internet, and read them. And then I signed on to a computer, which anyone can do nowadays, and I messed around with it for a few years, and now I know all about it. Does that make me a technocrat?
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What are letters?” “Kinda like mediaglyphics except they’re all black, and they’re tiny, they don’t move, they’re old and boring and really hard to read. But you can use ’em to make short words for long words.
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Which path do you intend to take, Nell?' said the Constable, sounding very interested. 'Conformity or rebellion?' Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded - they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.
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It is what you don't expect... that most needs looking for.
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You don't want your readers seeing easy connections it becomes a distraction.
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...your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.
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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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That's funny because if anyone actually did prove the existence of God we'd just tell him 'nice proof, Fraa Bly' and start believing in God.
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Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight.
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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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You should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that 'Diax's Rake.
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It is the fate of operating systems to become free.
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A lot of secular, modern people claim to be disillusioned whenever they learn that any smart person is religious. That's applicable to Newton as it is to any other religious smart person
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I was trying to run something to ground that had come to my attention when I was working on the Baroque Cycle. That series, of course, was about the conflict between Newton and Leibniz. Leibniz developed a system of metaphysics called monadology, which looked pretty weird at the time and was promptly buried by Newtonian-style physics.
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The hour of noon has passed,' said Judge Fang. 'Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
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Clearly Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he's about to go down in flames.
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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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The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it's only dust add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.
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