Quote

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?

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
Thing
Minute
Mind
Wait
Make
Drug
Difference
Shrugs
Minutes
Virus
Differences
Viruses
Waiting
Crash
Religion
Snow

More quotes by Neal Stephenson

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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.
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I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.
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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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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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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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She's not afraid. She's wearing a dentata.
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They went inside. The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power.
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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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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.
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How could your cover be blown in Canada? Why even bother going dark there? How could you tell?
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In trying to understand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look not at a single innovator but to a sort of bizarre Trinity : Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Bill Gates. Take away any of these three and Linux would not exist.
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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.
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.
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Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.
Neal Stephenson
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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.
Neal Stephenson
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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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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.
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.
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It is the fate of operating systems to become free.
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It is what you don't expect... that most needs looking for.
Neal Stephenson