Neal Stephenson
Neal Stephenson
Neal Town Stephensonis an American writer and game designer known for his works of speculative fiction...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth31 October 1959
CountryUnited States of America
years people gone
An old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market.
running gone easy
Of persons I will say this: it is difficult to tell when they are running aright but easy to see when something has gone awry.
figuring fill gave job soldier
For example, there was the day he gave me the job of figuring out how many jellybeans it would take to fill up Soldier Field.
across babies countries machine
Most countries are static, and they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight.
drive life pizza
But he wouldn't drive for CosaNostra Pizza any other way. You know why? Because there's something about having your life on the line.
entertainment needs persons
Once a person has all the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment.
hypocrite views hypocrisy
Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy... Because they were hypocrites, the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefarious conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves-they took no moral stances and lived by none.
adventure talking giving
Give me an adventure. I'm not talking about some massive adventure. Just something that would make getting fired seem small. Something that I might remember when I'm old." "I can't predict the future," I said, "but based on what little I know so far, I'm afraid it has to be a massive adventure or nothing." "Great!" "Probably the kind of adventure that ends in a mass burial.
machines littles thread
I don't like sewing machines. I don't understand how a needle with a thread going through the tip of it can interlock the thread by jamming itself into a little goddamn spool. It's contrary to nature and it irritates me.
choices littles matter
Jad said, "The leakage was forcing choices, the making of which in no way improved matters." Okay. So we were, in effect, locked in a room with a madman sorcerer. That clarified things a little.
dust ideas cosmos
The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it's only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.
book mind different
If the item of stolen property had been anything other than a book, it would have been confiscated. But a book is different—it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society,
shoes design looks
Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he'll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas "Fscking" Edison.
california southern bustle
Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.