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The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.

Paolo Bacigalupi

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Paolo Bacigalupi
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: August 6
Environmentalist
Fantasy Author
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Paonia
Colorado
Paolo Tadini Bacigalupi
Problem
Riding
Ever
Ended
Ghost
Shoulders
Behinds
Behind
Everyone
Ghosts
Left
Surviving

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Plenty of people say my guesses about a future drought in the western U.S. (where I live and grew up) are wrong, so I don't see why I won't be wrong in some people's eyes when I go set a story on foreign shores.
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The surfeit of bad trends pushes me to set my stories in worlds which are often diminished versions of our own present.
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Life is exponential. Two becomes four, becomes ten thousand, becomes a plague.
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Some things, it was better not to think about. It just made you mad and angry.
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If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.
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Nothing so mystical. Human beings hunger for killing, that is all. It only takes a few politicians to stoke division, or a few demagogues encouraging hatred to set your kind upon one another. And then before you know it, you have a whole nation biting on its own tail, going round and round until there is nothing left but the snapping of teeth.
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When I read, I'm either reading to learn, or I'm reading to switch off.
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What I'm hoping to do though is to ground my extrapolations in specificity, and to make sure that the story I tell is deliberately and honestly told.
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Food should come from the place of its origin, and stay there. It shouldn't spend its time crisscrossing the globe for the sake of profit.
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Take three different Thai writers and ask them to extrapolate their county's future, and one hopes that you'll get three very different - but all deeply honest - versions.
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When you were alone in the rising ocean, you grabbed whatever raft passed by.
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Men are loyal when you lead from the front.
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I'm a chess piece. A pawn,' she said. 'I can be sacrificed, but I cannot be captured. To be captured would be the end of the game.
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Politics is ugly. Never doubt what small men will do for great power.
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Nature has become something new. It is ours now, truly. And if our creation devours us, how poetic will that be?
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I used to love reading, but since I've started writing, it's harder for me to immerse, because I spend so much time looking at how the story is structured and trying to see what the author is doing behind the curtain.
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The more you read about and immerse in a culture, the more it comes alive, and the more textured and nuanced and detailed and unstereotypable it becomes.
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Knowledge is simply a terrible ocean we must cross, and hope that wisdom lies on the other side.
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She’d survived the Drowned Cities because she wasn’t anything like Mouse. When the bullets started flying and warlords started making examples of peacekeeper collaborators, Mahlia had kept her head down, instead of standing up like Mouse. She’d looked out for herself, first. And because of that, she’d survived.
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Sex and hypocrisy. They go together like coffee and cream.
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