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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.

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
Started
Structured
Trying
Since
Curtain
Much
Looking
Curtains
Time
Reading
Author
Love
Story
Harder
Spend
Stories
Behinds
Used
Behind
Immerse
Writing

More quotes by Paolo Bacigalupi

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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.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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When I read, I'm either reading to learn, or I'm reading to switch off.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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A desert's a stupid place to put a river.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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Pain held no terror for him. Pain was, if not friend, then family, something he had grown up with in his crèche, learning to respect but never yield to. Pain was simply a message, telling him which limbs he could still use to slaughter his enemies, how far he could still run, and what his chances were in the next battle.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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Politics is ugly. Never doubt what small men will do for great power.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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I do not fight battles that cannot be won. Do not confuse that with cowardice.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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Suicide is not something I owe you or yours.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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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.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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Laws are a fine thing on paper, but painful when no bribery can ease their bind.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your potential fully upon it.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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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.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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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.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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Killing isn't free. It takes something out of you every time you do it. You get their life they get a piece of your soul. It's always a trade.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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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.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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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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Men are loyal when you lead from the front.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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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.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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Environmental science is telling us a lot about our future and what it could look like, whether we're talking about global warming (the current poster child for the environment) or a loss of genetic diversity in our food supplies, or the effects of low-dose chemicals on human development.
Paolo Bacigalupi