Greg Egan Quotes

Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.

You know what they say the modern version of Pascal's Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God.

Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century.

No one grows up. That's one of the sickest lies they ever tell you. People change. People compromise. People get stranded in situations they don't want to be in… and they make the best of it. But don't try to tell me it's some kind of… glorious preordained ascent into emotional maturity. It's not.

Fandom is about fandom, it's a great big social club.

Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I've been led astray like that myself at times.

For there is a truth which cannot be bought or sold, imposed by force, resisted or escaped.

Being rewarded for anything other than the quality of their work is the fastest way to screw-up a writer-and it isn't only new ones who suffer from that.

I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.

I'm rarely grabbed by anything the way I was when I was 10 years younger. About the only relatively new artists whose albums I own are Beck, and They Might Be Giants.

On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed.

The Universe may be stranger than we can imagine, but it's going to have a tough time outdoing Egan.

I've supported myself by writing since 1992, and I'm probably very nearly unemployable by now because employers are likely to be put off by the long gap.

I admire David Lynch so much, and I think he made some bad decisions with Lost Highway.

I hadn't given much thought to the prospect of a Hugo nomination at the time it happened, but obviously once you're nominated, winning one seems a bit less far-fetched than before.

Screw every known human culture.

If we spend all our time gazing at the wonders ahead without remembering where we're standing right now, we're going to trip and fall flat on our face, over and over again.

How does it feel to be seven thousand years old? That depends. On what? On how I want to feel.

Would I have been happier? Maybe. But then, happiness was overrated.

Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.

Australian SF book publishing has undergone a boom recently, and sometimes it's easier for new writers to sell a book to a local publisher first, which then makes a US edition more likely.

Mathematics catalogues everything that is not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics is an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders.

It was almost noon when the plane touched down at the Triad airport on the outskirts of Greensboro. There was a hire car waiting for me; I waved my notepad at the dashboard to transmit my profile, then waited as the seating and controls rearranged themselves slightly, piezoelectric actuators humming. As I started to reverse out of the parking bay, the stereo began a soothing improvisation, flashing up a deadpan title: Music for Leaving Airports 11 June 2008.

A story in Asimov's is read by hundreds of thousands of people.

No, that’s journalism. The truth is whatever you can’t escape.

Everyone here would die for the sake of truth. Everyone here lies constantly for the tiniest chance of personal gain. This is what it means to be a scientist.

I've been taking longer to write stories lately.

I think new writers everywhere need opportunities to get published.

I don't have any structured grand plan; I just intend to keep writing about the things that interest me-some of which change, some of which don't.