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It is what you don't expect... that most needs looking for.
Neal Stephenson
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Neal Stephenson
Age: 64
Born: 1959
Born: October 31
Author
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Camp Annapolis Junction
Neal Town Stephenson
Stephen Bury
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More quotes by Neal Stephenson
Talent was not rare the ability to survive having it was.
Neal Stephenson
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
Neal Stephenson
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.
Neal Stephenson
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.
Neal Stephenson
So, you're worried that a pink dragon will fly over the concent and fart nerve gas on us?
Neal Stephenson
All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us.
Neal Stephenson
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
Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.
Neal Stephenson
That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.
Neal Stephenson
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
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.
Neal Stephenson
The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future it's an awareness that this is different.
Neal Stephenson
I just assume I'm not invisible. I assume I'm wearing fluorescent clothes, and there's a million-dollar bounty going to the first driver who manages to hit me. And I ride on that assumption.
Neal Stephenson
They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.
Neal Stephenson
Gold is the corpse of value.
Neal Stephenson
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.
Neal Stephenson
She's not afraid. She's wearing a dentata.
Neal Stephenson
Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs, I said. We have a protractor.
Neal Stephenson
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?
Neal Stephenson
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.
Neal Stephenson