Paolo Bacigalupi Quotes

Short fiction seems more targeted - hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it's a lot smokier and less defined.

An untrampled scorpion troubles no one.

Laws are a fine thing on paper, but painful when no bribery can ease their bind.

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

For me as a kid, reading cyberpunk was like seeing the world for the first time. Gibson's Neuromancer wasn't just stylistically stunning; it felt like the template for a future that we were actively building. I remember reading Sterling's Islands in the Net and suddenly understanding the disruptive potential of technology once it got out into the street. Cyberpunk felt urgent. It wasn't the future 15 minutes out - it was the future sideswiping you and leaving you in a full-body cast as it passed by.

No one else noticed, or cared. It was just something they did. Taking other people’s livestock. Other people’s lives. She watched the soldiers, hating them. They were different in so many ways, white and black, yellow and brown, skinny, short, tall, small, but they were all the same. Didn’t matter if they wore finger-bone necklaces, or baby teeth on bracelets, or tattoos on their chests to ward off bullets. In the end, they were all mangled with battle scars and their eyes were all dead.

At some point, you realize you can't provide a perfectly monolithic description of a foreign culture's future any more than you can provide a monolithic description of your own hometown's future. Your choices about what to emphasize and what to leave out make all the difference, and ultimately, your fingerprints and biases and viewpoints are going to be all over the story.

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.

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.

Suicide is not something I owe you or yours.

Knowledge is simply a terrible ocean we must cross, and hope that wisdom lies on the other side.

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.

The surfeit of bad trends pushes me to set my stories in worlds which are often diminished versions of our own present.

I write at a standing desk, which has helped me be much more productive and solved some back problems, but mostly all my quirky habits have to do with procrastination and avoidance rather than with work. I'm slowly trying to stamp those out.

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.

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.

The future looks a bit bleak to me.

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.

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.

Sex and hypocrisy. They go together like coffee and cream.

For pleasure, I'll read military sf, or Elmore Leonard capers, anything that's fast and fun. Otherwise, I mostly pick at books, without any clear focus.

We write dust epitaphs for our vanquished enemies and watch them blow away in the desert wind.

Men are loyal when you lead from the front.

Life is exponential. Two becomes four, becomes ten thousand, becomes a plague.

All life produces waste. The act of living produces costs, hazards and disposal questions, and so the (Environment) Ministry has found itself in the center of all life, mitigating, guiding and policing the detritus of the average person along with investigating the infractions of the greedy and short-sighted, the ones who wish to make quick profits and trade on others' lives for it.

It's still a load. If there was balance, the soldier boys would all be dead, and we'd be sitting pretty in the middle of the Drowned Cities, shipping marble and steel and copper and getting paid Red Chinese for every kilo. We'd be rich and they'd be dead, if there was such a thing as the Scavenge God, or his scales. And that goes double for the Deepwater priests. They're all full of it. Nothing balances out.

Blood is not destiny.

Knowledge is always two-edged. For every benefit, there is hazard. For every good, evil.

She smiles at him, too young to know him for a stranger, and too innocent yet to care.

They say in the military that a good battle plan can last as long as five minutes in real fighting. After that, it comes down to if the general is favored by fate and the spirits.

Of course, the more you read, the more you learn, and ultimately there is more information than you can ever use. The difficulty is that as an outsider, you know you're too ignorant for your own good, and so the urge to keep researching and *never* start writing is pretty strong.

Nature has become something new. It is ours now, truly. And if our creation devours us, how poetic will that be?

Debts are a heavy burden. Throw them off, and you walk free.

When I read, I'm either reading to learn, or I'm reading to switch off.

At first, when California started winning its water lawsuits and shutting off cities, the displaced people just followed the water-right to California. It took a little while before the bureaucrats realized what was going on, but finally someone with a sharp pencil did the math and realized that taking in people along with their water didn't solve a water shortage.

If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.

I like fast plots with things that explode.

Mahlia... understood Doctor Mahfouz and his blind rush into the village. He wasn't trying to change them. He wasn't trying to save anyone. He was just trying to not be part of the sickness. Mahlia had thought he was stupid for walking straight into death, but now, as she lay against the pillar, she saw it differently. She thought she'd been surviving. She thought that she'd been fighting for herself. But all she'd done was create more killing, and in the end it had all led to this moment, where they bargained with a demon ... not for their lives, but for their souls

Don't tell me about worth," Nita said. "My father commands fleets." "The wealthy measure everything with the weight of their money." Tool leaned close. "Sadna once risked herself and the rest of her crew to help me escape from an oil fire... Your father commands fleets. And thousands of half-men, I am sure. But would he risk himself to save a single one?

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.

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.

They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.

Some things, it was better not to think about. It just made you mad and angry.

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.

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.

But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.

When you were alone in the rising ocean, you grabbed whatever raft passed by.

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.

I do not fight battles that cannot be won. Do not confuse that with cowardice.

Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way of justice.