Austin Grossman Quotes & Sayings

The people who hired me have been shot. The people who shot them have been shot. — Austin Grossman

It's raining outside. How did you get here? And how did you get to be twenty-eight? — Austin Grossman

You don't build a 100 ft robot out of nothing ... there's rumors and gossip, trace evidence. There's a shadow economy out there, where these things get done. — Austin Grossman

My name is Richard Milhous Nixon. I swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. I was educated at Whittier College in Whittier, California, and I have seen the devil walk. — Austin Grossman

I'm cold and free and the smartest man in the world, and this time they're going to know it, I promise you. I promise you that. — Austin Grossman

Writing a novel was completely awesome because parts of it could suck and I could throw them away. I didn't have to know the ending until I got there. — Austin Grossman

In sooth, thy life sounds passing strange and shitty. — Austin Grossman

None of the questions was what I expected. Most of them were esoteric thought experiments, 'How would you turn Pride and Prejudice into a video game?' and 'If you added a button to Pac-Man, what would you want it to do?' Conundrums like 'How come when Mario jumps he can change direction in midair? — Austin Grossman

We were feeling something they never had - a physical link into the world of the fictional - through the skeletal muscles of the arm to the joystick to the tiny person on the screen, a person in an imagined world. It was crude but real. — Austin Grossman

Depending on how you looked at it, Darren was our Mick Jagger (designated swaggering extrovert) to Simon's Keith Richards (quietly virtuosic, blatantly self-destructive). Or else Darren had been Paul McCartney (chirpily commercial) and Simon had been John Lennon (moody, introspective, possessed of quasi-mystical insights). — Austin Grossman

I'm drawing a diagram of what time looks like if you're looking straight into it - like looking down a tunnel and seeing a circle, if the tunnel were an angry ten-dimensional crab, which is what, in vastly oversimplified terms, we mean by the human word time. — Austin Grossman

If you're different you always know it, and you can't fix it even if you want to — Austin Grossman

When you can't bear something but it goes on anyway, the person who survives isn't you anymore; you've changed and become someone else, a new person, the one who did bear it after all. — Austin Grossman

Another teen friendship, another tiny mysterious universe. — Austin Grossman

I often wonder what Einstein would have done in my position. At Peterson, I kept an Einstein poster in my room, the one that says 'Imagination is more important than knowledge.' Einstein was smart, maybe even as smart as Laserator, but he played it way too safe. Then again, nobody ever threw a grappling hook at Einstein. I like to think he would have enjoyed my work, if he could have seen it. But no one sees anything I do, not until it's hovering over Chicago. — Austin Grossman

As Eskimo language is to snow, so archaic English is to 'metal objects designed to cause harm'. — Austin Grossman

I was thirty-five and I'd thought I was playing political poker and it turned out I'd been playing in some other game I didn't even know about. Like I'd been holding a hand of kings and then the people around the table started putting down more kings, a king with a squid's face, a naked king with goat's horns holding up a bough of holly. A Russian king with an insect's voice. — Austin Grossman

I'm the smartest man in the world. Once I wore a cape in public, and fought battles against men who could fly, who had metal skin, who could kill you with their eyes. I fought CoreFire to a standstill, and the Super Squadron, and the Champions. Now I have to shuffle through a cafeteria line with men who tried to pass bad checks. Now I have to wonder if there will be chocolate milk in the dispenser. And whether the smartest man in the world has done the smartest thing he could do with his life. — Austin Grossman

The woman was simply leaving us alone with our future, the future she wouldn't be a part of. She didn't know how to do it or what it was, but she was trying to give it to us. — Austin Grossman

Nixon is fascinating because he's our most alienated president. Everybody felt that they never knew who he was - that's palpable in the histories. His face is so cartoony that he's become this cartoon figure. I never really related to the romanticization of J.F.K., and I knew too much about Reagan to idealize him. Nixon falls in between. — Austin Grossman

Some days I spent up to three hours in the arcade after school, dimly aware that we were the first people, ever, to be doing these things. We were feeling something they never had - a physical link into the world of the fictional - through the skeletal muscles of the arm to the joystick to the tiny person on the screen, a person in an imagined world. It was crude but real. We'd fashioned an outpost in the hostile, inaccessible world of the imagination, like dangling a bathysphere into the crushing dark of the deep ocean, a realm hitherto inaccessible to humankind. This is what games had become. Computers had their origin in military cryptography - in a sense, every computer game represents the commandeering of a military code-breaking apparatus for purposes of human expression. We'd done that, taken that idea and turned it into a thing its creators never imagined, our own incandescent mythology. — Austin Grossman

We held certain truths to be self-evident, but those truths were that elves hate orcs and wizards can't wear metal armor. — Austin Grossman

Little Red Riding Hood was a good story, but it wasn't interactive. Sooner or later I wanted to say 'no, I may be Red Riding Hood but I don't care about my grandmother; what I want is heroin and only heroin,' whereas the game had only 'over the river and through the woods' to offer me. Which was a good story, it just might not me mine. — Austin Grossman

Wearing a cape doesn't do much for your social life. — Austin Grossman

Even if I turned myself in, it wouldn't change anything. It wouldn't make me one of them. I knew that when I got my powers, but really I knew it before then. I learned it as a child on my first day of school, on the warm rainy streets of Bangkok, and in college. If you're different you always know it, and you can't fix it even if you want to. What do you do when you find out your heart is the wrong kind? You take what you're given, and be the hero you can be. Hero to your own cold, inverted heart. — Austin Grossman

The heroes pop out at you, impossibly vivid, colorful as playing cards but all from different decks, a jumble of incompatible suits and denominations dealt out for an Alice in Wonderland game. — Austin Grossman

Delicious ... Everything I'd hoped for in a new Wild Cards book. The character interactions and plot twists have exactly the complexity, surprise, and unsentimental realism I'd expect out of a George R. R. Martin project. — Austin Grossman

The video game story-development process is incredibly broken. — Austin Grossman

There are days when you just don't feel all that evil."
You don't become a world-class villain overnight."
-Dr. Impossible — Austin Grossman

If you haven't been this close to superhumans, you don't understand what it's like to fight them. Even when you've got powers yourself, the predominent impression is one of shock. The forces moving around you are out of human scale, and your nervous system doesn't know how to deal with it. It's like being in a car accident, over and over again. You never feel the pain until later. — Austin Grossman

When your laboratory explodes, lacing your body with a supercharged elixir, what do you do? You don't just lie there. You crawl out of the rubble, hideously scarred, and swear vengeance on the world. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world. — Austin Grossman

Your powers are what you always have with you. It's one piece of knowledge we all share here. No matter how many dossiers the government keeps on you, no matter what data your enemies have collected, no one knows your powers the way you do. Everyone has seen them on TV. For everyone else, it's a momentary fantasy. They don't have to take them into the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bedroom. Or wake up in the night in flames, or sweep up shattered glass in their apartment, or show up late for work with a black eye. No one else knows where they itch or bruise you, or has tried the things you've tried with them when you were bored or desperate. No one else falls asleep with them and finds them still there in the morning, a dream that won't disperse upon waking. — Austin Grossman

I saw the misadjusted dials and the whirling gauges and the bubbling green fluid and the electricity arcing around, and a story laid out for me, my sorry self alchemically transmuted into power and robots and fortresses and orbital platforms and costumes and alien kings. — Austin Grossman

I wrote code that merely did what it was supposed to do. Simon's solutions were rapid and weird - convoluted, sometimes in a pointless way, often in a way that looked pointless until you saw how elegant it was. — Austin Grossman

Computers had their origin in military cryptography - in a sense, every computer game represents the commandeering of a military code-breaking apparatus for purposes of human expression. — Austin Grossman

A generation of lawyers and statisticians cut their teeth on the to-hit and damage tables of medieval fantasy. File it under yet another ridiculous thing that probably saved somebody's life. — Austin Grossman

Could you make a computer imagine an entire world? How would you start? A generation of people would wrestle with this problem - they're still wrestling with it. — Austin Grossman

Long-range missiles with hybrid thermonuclear and necromantic payloads. Grafted and crossbred infantry divisions. Strategic alliances with folkloric, extraplanar, and subterranean entities. Field deployment of weaponized paleofauna. Large-scale saturation of target areas with invasive fungal and floral xeno organisms. Megadeaths and mega-undeaths. This is the Cold War now. An American president must be found who, whatever his other qualifications, is prepared to maintain our competitiveness in this area. I'm afraid that that person is you. — Austin Grossman

You haven't known terror until you've been chased by a man-sized crow. — Austin Grossman

It was an unfamiliar feeling, waking up with a place to go, a place I was actually beginning to comprehend and face without a sense of terror.
More than that, I was even questioning the assumption that I was, in my bones, a scared and anxious and miserable person. It felt like the days were almost supernaturally good, that I could wake up without the usual wave of terror, that the days were admixed with some foreign substance dripping into them, some animating essence, like the dragonborn races of Endoria, dragonborn days. I felt like I'd stumbled on one of the open secrets of the world. Why hadn't I realized before that being a grown-up could be anything you wanted it to be? — Austin Grossman

He had never been to a party like this and it struck him as a little bizarre, like a feverish nightmare version of school. It was the exact same mass of people, but they had all shown up in the middle of the night, and now there were no teachers and everyone stood in the hallways talking as loudly as possible, and there were no classes except lunch, or else the classes were all different and he hadn't ever studied for any of them. — Austin Grossman

Chess is a game with simple rules and pieces, a small sixty-four-space board, but there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the universe. — Austin Grossman

Who wants to make the language of dreams? — Austin Grossman

Lisa had an engineer's way of shrugging off the entire field of the humanities, all three thousand years of it, as self-indulgent fuzzy thinking. — Austin Grossman

The voice came from the other side of the divider, an older man, bald, who wore a leather vest over a dark blue button-down shirt, like a Radio Shack manager who moonlighted as a forest brigand. — Austin Grossman

What does it mean to conquer the world? Is there really a way to do it? Do you have to be the richest one, or the smartest one, or to beat everyone in a fight? Or just know you could? Is it to be invincible? Does it just mean you get the girl you really wanted? Did CoreFire already conquer the world a long time ago? Did I? Or maybe there is no way to do it. No one could have tried harder than I have. Haven't I already fought a hundred battles, and lost every one? Three — Austin Grossman

With 'Invincible', I wanted to create my own version of the Marvel or DC universe, with my own heroes and villains. — Austin Grossman

I miss the girl I was, and I wish I could tell her that. But she got hurt really bad and I've been waiting such a long time for her to be okay again. I bet she never dreamed she would live so long, or do the things she can do now. I wish I could tell her what she'd grow up to be, how strange and beautiful and unexpected she'd be. She'd probably feel a lot better if she knew. The sky and the stars are brilliant, and I think of how much she would have loved this. — Austin Grossman

When you get your powers, you learn a lot about yourself. My professors called me mad. It was time for me to stop punishing myself, and start punishing everybody else. — Austin Grossman

I won but I wasn't like Pat. Because - and why this should be I'll never know - I never did a thing that wasn't somehow touched with selfish, furtive hunger, with a private, annihilating need for recognition. Because I'm like a child in a fairy tale cursed from birth, and there has never been anything I can put my hand to without tainting it, no triumph so great or solemn that it doesn't turn spoiled and ridiculous. Because, sooner or later, the darkness always gets in. — Austin Grossman

I'm really curious about the memory of Nixon for people who grew up under Clinton. What do people remember of him? In his day, the definition of a conservative right-wing president is more like a centrist in our own time. He's also one of our funnier presidents - just a really good character to write about. — Austin Grossman

This isn't the first time you've done this, or the fifth or the tenth. I guess it's time to think of it as your life. — Austin Grossman

The United States of America is logically the least magical place in the world. Planned by committee, not even a country, just a legal umbrella for fifty associated provinces, an elaborate polling system for creating other larger and more permanent committees. No mysteries; no demons; one God at the most. Sure, it had its own folklore and tall tales, but it wasn't the same. Its rulers weren't descended from men and women who spoke with birds and rode dragons. Johnny Appleseed and Paul Bunyan were hayseeds, folksy also-rans compared to the madness in the ancient royal blood going back to the Druids, to Byzantium, to Mithraic cults. — Austin Grossman

You mean like in Archon? For the C64?"
"Um. Right." Lisa scowled even a little more. A bearded guy at the back rolled his eyes, as if in disbelief at what a loser I was; he was wearing a jester's hat. It had come to this. — Austin Grossman

If I had writing materials, I might write a guidebook, a source of advice and inspiration for the next generation of masked criminals, bent prodigies, and lonely geniuses, the ones who've been taught to feel different, or the ones who knew it from the start. The ones who are smart enough to do something about it. There are things they should hear. Somebody has to tell them. — Austin Grossman

I would have skipped the following day if I could have. I ddin't even like Disney World. I was, in fact, slightly afraid of it. When Khrushchev visited Disneyland in 1959, he wasn't allowed in. It was said that the American authorities couldn't guarantee his safety inside. And whatever else Khrushchev was, I would have backed him against an infantry division. — Austin Grossman

My ultimate game - or at least one I would really like to see - would be something where it was like the beginning of George R. R. Martin's 'Game of Thrones', where you're Ned Stark, and you know that one of your friends has been murdered, and you go to the capital city and you have to navigate this web of court intrigue. — Austin Grossman

There's a fine line between a superpower and a chronic medical condition. — Austin Grossman

One day you wake up and realize the world can be conquered ... I'm going to put a mask on and scrawl my name across the face of the world, build cities of gold, come back and stomp this place flat, until even the bricks are just dust. So you can just shut up. All of you. I'm going to move the world. — Austin Grossman

Save the world? I don't think so. I have my reasons. The world was lost a long time ago, and nothing's going to fix it, maybe not even science. — Austin Grossman

Video games are a huge, incredibly popular, world-transforming medium. — Austin Grossman

You resolve to reach the center of the galaxy, the center of everything, if you can, and that's where the game ends, now not a game at all but a campaign that's going to go on as long as your life does, no matter what you think of me now, because we are graduating from high school, from college, getting married, and now it's time for all cards to be turned over, all items identified, all secret areas revealed. And now at last maybe we can score this thing properly. — Austin Grossman

This morning on planet Earth, there are 1,686 enhanced, gifted, or otherwise superpowered persons. 678 use their powers to fight crime, while 441 use their powers to commit them. 44 are currently confined in Special Containment Facilities for enhanced criminals. Of these last, it is interesting to note that an unusually high proportion have IQs of 300 or more
eighteen to be exact. Including me. You really have to wonder why we all end up in jail. — Austin Grossman

All of it. Lincoln, Taft, what they did. The H-bomb, the RAND Corporation, the king of Persia, the whole long con of it all. — Austin Grossman