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
Neal Stephenson quotes about
two alternatives compromise
And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.
strong writing character
At the beginning of the project, I wasn't certain that I could come up with an engaging storyline and cast of characters in this world, so I had a strong bias toward actually writing, and worrying about research later. In other words, I was afraid that I'd devote a year or two of my life to grinding through Kant and Husserl, then discover that there simply was no novel to be written here.
annoying courses
Technically, of course, he was right. Socially, he was annoying us.
powerful thinking two
Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microsoft is the very embodiment of modern high-tech prosperity--it is, in a word, bourgeois--and so it attracts all of the same gripes.
running style trying
I was trying to run something to ground that had come to my attention when I was working on the Baroque Cycle. That series, of course, was about the conflict between Newton and Leibniz. Leibniz developed a system of metaphysics called monadology, which looked pretty weird at the time and was promptly buried by Newtonian-style physics.
powerful world ifs
See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places,
teenage guy narrators
So a lot of what you see in the Baroque Cycle is me wanting to be one of those guys. In the case of Anathem, I needed something that was more formal, less flashy, as if it had been translated from the classical language of another planet, but enlivened with slang terms that a teenage narrator would enjoy throwing around.
fate operating-systems
It is the fate of operating systems to become free.
html world paper
This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.
our-world mind stories
The mind knows...that there is an action principle that governs how the world evolves from one moment to the next - that restricts our world's path to points that tell an internally consistent story.
operating-systems unix oral-history
Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.
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.
writing oxford ideas
In the room where I work, I have a chalkboard, and as I'm going along, I write the made-up words on it. A few feet from that chalkboard is a copy of the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, to which I refer frequently as a source of ideas and word roots.
hypocrisy republic virtue
If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.