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Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.

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
Much
Unix
Oral
Operating
System
History

More quotes by Neal Stephenson

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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.
Neal Stephenson
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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
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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 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
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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?
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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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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The suspect had experienced a ballistic interlude earlier in the evening, Miss Pao said, regrettably not filmed, and relieved himself of excess velocity by means of an ablative technique.
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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When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.
Neal Stephenson
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It is what you don't expect... that most needs looking for.
Neal Stephenson
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The hour of noon has passed,' said Judge Fang. 'Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
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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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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Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.
Neal Stephenson
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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.
Neal Stephenson
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Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs, I said. We have a protractor.
Neal Stephenson
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Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
Neal Stephenson
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This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.
Neal Stephenson
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Constable Moore had reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst irritations - whisky, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes - without feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on.
Neal Stephenson