Greg Egan Quotes & Sayings

It was still the pre-eminent social networking site for the 0-3 age group — Greg Egan

You don't take a traveler for a partner if you hope that the world will always stay the same. You do it because you can't quite break away, yourself, but you can't live without the promise of change hanging over you every day.

That's what the border means, for a lot of people. The promise of change they'd never be able to make any other way. — Greg Egan

You have to be doubly foolish to be a Satanist," Stoney muttered.
"Doubly?"
"Not only do you need to believe all the nonsense of Christian theology, you then have to turn around and back the preordained, guaranteed-to-fail, absolutely futile losing side. — Greg Egan

It all adds up to normality. — Greg Egan

I've been taking longer to write stories lately. — Greg Egan

I used to think that if you changed from ... valuing one thing to valuing another, it was because you'd learnt something new, understood something better. And it's not like that at all. I just value what I'm stuck with. That's it, that's the whole story. People make a virtue out of necessity. They sanctify what they can't escape. — Greg Egan

Paul closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun. In spite of everything, it was hard not to take solace from the warmth flooding onto his skin. He stretched the muscles in his arms, his shoulders, his back -- and it felt like he was reaching out from the "self" in his virtual skull to all his mathematical flesh, imprinting the nebulous data with meaning; binding it all together, staking some kind of claim. He felt the stirrings of an erection. Existence was beginning to seduce him. He let himself surrender for a moment to a visceral sense of identity which drowned out all his pale mental images of optical processors, all his abstract reflections on the software's approximations and short-cuts. This body didn't want to evaporate. This body didn't want to bale out. It didn't much care that there was another -- "more real" -- version of itself elsewhere. It wanted to retain its wholeness. It wanted to endure. — Greg Egan

I said, 'The truth is whatever you can get away with.' 'No, that's journalism. The truth is whatever you can't escape. — Greg Egan

Only the promise of eternal growth made sense of eternal life. Kate — Greg Egan

If you want to make it human, make it whole. — Greg Egan

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

If I'd said that to my sensible, smutty, twelve-year-old self, he would have laughed until he hemorrhaged — Greg Egan

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. — Greg Egan

I was recruited by the dead,' Zak said. 'Not in any rush to join them in their silence, but from the urgent need to understand what they might have thought and done that could survive them, that could speak across the ages, that could be continued even now. — Greg Egan

It's depressing at times, but I try to keep a sense of perspective. Sweet F.A. will never be more than a bunch of thugs and vandals, high in nuisance value, but politically irrelevant. I've seen them on TV, marching around their "training camps" in designer camouflage, or sitting in lecture theaters, watching recorded speeches by their guru, Jack Kelly, or (oblivious to the irony) messages of "international solidarity" from similar organizations in Europe and North America. — Greg Egan

He turned back to face them. 'I do make sense to you, don't I? I'm not just imagining that communication is taking place? — Greg Egan

If you'd managed to force it open, you would have made a direct path between the interior of the Peerless and the void, which is something we try to discourage. — Greg Egan

Parantham finally realized that selecting a star on the map enabled a sub-menu with the unassuming option "Go to star". Choosing this did not change the map's viewpoint or magnification; rather, it caused the map to inquire politely, "Are you sure you wish to travel to this star? — Greg Egan

The environment was full of birds and insects, rodents and small reptiles - decorative in appearance, but also satisfying a more abstract aesthetic: softening the harsh radial symmetry of the lone observer; anchoring the simulation by perceiving it from a multitude of view-points. Ontological guy lines. — Greg Egan

All I'm saying is, technology can potentially do better than nature because of the very fact that it's not always a matter of life or death. If an organism has been fine-tuned to maximize its overall reproductive success, that's not the same thing as embodying the ideal solution to every individual problem it faces. Evolution appears inventive to us because it's had time to try so many possibilities, but it has no margin at all for real risks, let alone anything truly whimsical. We can celebrate our own beautiful mistakes. All evolution can do is murder them. — Greg Egan

Twelve thousand years after walking the plank, Rakesh woke on the floor of his tent. He was lying face-down on a blue and gold sleeping mat; he drew in a deep breath to savour the rich scent of its fibres. This was the tent he'd carried with him on all his travels on Shab-e-Noor, and it remained with him wherever he went. — Greg Egan

This was her last chance at the closest thing to freedom: her will, her actions, and the outcome in the world could all be in harmony. — Greg Egan

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

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. — Greg Egan

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. — Greg Egan

Isn't that what the Peerless is for? Anything too difficult for the home world? — Greg Egan

We have a special name, here, for a certain kind of failure to defer to the greater good - for putting a personal sense of doing right above any objective measure of the outcome. It's called 'moral vanity'. — Greg Egan

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

Often when she thought she was reading his body — Greg Egan

We learn precisely enough to keep us from wanting to know any more — Greg Egan

I was matter, like everything else. I could feel the slow decay of my body, the absolute certainty of death. Every heartbeat spelt out a new proof of mortality. Every moment was a premature burial. — Greg Egan

When everyone had backups of themselves scattered around the galaxy, it required a
vastly disproportionate effort to inconvenience someone, let alone kill them. — Greg Egan

The physical world was one vast, tangled obstacle course of pointless, arbitrary restrictions. We'd — Greg Egan

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

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. — Greg Egan

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. — Greg Egan

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

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. — Greg Egan

Imagine the time, a dozen generations from now, when wave mechanics powers every machine and everyone takes it for granted. Do you really want them thinking that it feel from the sky, fully formed, when the truth is that they or their good fortune to the most powerful engine of change in history: people arguing about science. — Greg Egan

Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century. — Greg Egan

Evolution was a random walk across a minefield, not a pre-ordained trajectory, onward and upward toward perfection. — Greg Egan

A computer model which manipulated data about itself and its "surroundings" in essentially the same way as an organic brain would have to possess essentially the same mental states. "Simulated consciousness" was as oxymoronic as "simulated addition. — Greg Egan

Who exactly am I saving from shame, when I'll live and die in every possible way? — Greg Egan

You'll never stop changing, but that doesn't
mean you have to drift in the wind. Every day, you can take
the person you've been, and the new things you've witnessed,
and make your own, honest choice as to who you should become.
Whatever happens, you can always be true to yourself. But
don't expect to end up with the same inner compass as anyone
else. Not unless they started beside you, and climbed beside
you every step of the way. — Greg Egan

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

Rakesh said, 'What do the Aloof think we can do with this, that they can't do themselves?' 'Give a damn?' Parantham suggested. — Greg Egan

All we can ever know about are the portraits of each other inside our own skulls. — Greg Egan

He blinked in the gloom. He was wearing heavy black trousers and a waistcoat over a stiff white shirt. His exoself, having chosen an obsession which would have been meaningless in a world of advanced computers, had dressed him for the part of a Victorian naturalist.
The drawers, he knew, were full of beetles. Hundreds of thousands of beetles. He was free, now, to do nothing with his time but study them, sketch them, annotate them, classify them: specimen by specimen, species by species, decade after decade. The prospect was so blissful that he almost keeled over with joy. — Greg Egan

A matter of pragmatism; chemically knocking someone senseless is usually quieter, less messy and less risky to the assailant than killing them. — Greg Egan

No wonder most fleshers had stampeded into the polises, once they had the chance: if disease and aging weren't reason enough, there was gravity, friction, and inertia. The physical world was one vast, tangled obstacle course of pointless, arbitrary restrictions. — Greg Egan

He'd never been lectured on Darwinism in any brothel back home, but then what could he expect in a country run by godless socialists? — Greg Egan

Let me understand you. Let me piece you together, hold you together. Let me help you to explain yourself. — Greg Egan

You know, in formal logic, an inconsistent set of axioms can be used to prove anything at all. Once you have a single contradiction, A and not A, there's nothing you can't derive from it. — Greg Egan

Nobody wants to spend eternity alone. — Greg Egan

The reason there was no name for such distant relatives was because sane people would have no interest in distinguishing them from anyone else. "Once — Greg Egan

There's nothing worse than a label to cement people's loyalties. — Greg Egan

walked a few paces away from her, then turned his whole body towards the south; in this flat desert, it wasn't impractical to triple his axial span. He — Greg Egan

I hope you theorists know what you're doing.' 'I can assure you that we don't. The geometry is still beyond us. All I learnt in the void was that our best guess so far is certainly wrong. — Greg Egan

They floated for a while, two flesher-shaped creatures and a giant worm in a cloud of spinning metal fragments, an absurd collection of imaginary debris, glinting by the light of the true stars. — Greg 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. — Greg Egan

What am I? The data? The process that generates it? The relationships between the numbers? — Greg Egan

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. — Greg Egan

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

Death never gave meaning to life: it was always the other way round. — Greg Egan

Pick a number between ten and a thousand. Don't tell me what it is. [Thinks ... 575] Add the digits together. [17] Add them again. [8] Add 3. [11] Subtract this from the original number. [564] Add the digits together. [15] Find the remainder left when you divide by nine. [6] Square it. [36] Add 6. [42] The number in your head now is ... 42? [Yes!] Now try it once again ... — Greg Egan

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 agaain. — Greg Egan

We've been half right about a lot of things, but there's something missing from our theories, something whose nature we haven't even guessed yet. If we don't learn to understand it, it will kill us. — Greg Egan

As he walked past shops and teahouses he could still — Greg Egan

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

Is a stranger in a crowd less than human, just because you can't witness her inner life? — Greg Egan

And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious to any child ... even though it went against everything innate to the species: the wild, undisciplined love of patterns, the craving to extract meaning and comfort from everything in sight.
We thought we were passing on everything that mattered to our children: science, history, literature,
art. Vast libraries of information lay at their fingertips. But we hadn't fought hard enough to pass on
the hardest-won truth of all: Morality comes only from within. Meaning comes only from within. Outside our own skulls, the universe is indifferent. — Greg Egan

I think new writers everywhere need opportunities to get published. — Greg Egan

You know my position. We need to come back in force and deal with this sickness once and for all: occupy the city, impose our own laws, harvest every noxious plant and burn it. It — Greg Egan

Dear Earth-dweller: Please use your BRAIN! As anyone KNOWS in this SCIENTIFIC age, the origin of the races is now WELL UNDERSTOOD! Africans traveled here after the DELUGE from Mercury, Asians from Venus, Caucasians from Mars, and the people of the Pacific islands from assorted asteroids. If you don't have the NECESSARY OCCULT SKILLS to project rays from the continents to the ASTRAL PLANE to verify this, a simple analysis of TEMPERAMENT and APPEARANCE should make this obvious even to YOU! But please don't put WORDS into MY mouth! Just because we're all from different PLANETS doesn't mean we can't still be FRIENDS. — Greg Egan

No one objects to the notion that every technological civilisation might undergo its own Introdus. — Greg Egan

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

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. — Greg Egan

Detective Segel, the evidence shows that you experienced a penile erection when the defendant opened fire. Would you describe that as an appropriate response? — Greg Egan

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. — Greg Egan

If Zendegi was a frivolous indulgence, well, it was there alongside every other beautiful, forbidden thing that her contemporaries have risked their lives to regain — Greg Egan

The campaign was also among the most heated in recent memory, or short -term anticipation. The soon-to-be Opposition Leader never tired of listing the promises the new Prime Minister would break; she in turn countered with statistics of the mess he'd create as Treasurer, in the mid-eighties. (The causes of that impending recession were still being debated by economists; most claimed it was an "essential precursor" of the prosperity of the nineties , and that The Market, in its infinite, time -spanning wisdom, would choose / had chosen the best of all possible futures. Personally, I suspect it simply proved that even foresight was no cure for incompetence. — Greg Egan

Don't underestimate the need to appeal to people's imaginations. Maybe you can see all the consequences of your work, already. Other people might need to have them spelled out explicitly. Maria — Greg Egan

It was like listening to two badly written computer programs trying to convince each other that they were sentient. — Greg Egan

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. — Greg Egan

Order my life. I'm nothing without you: fragments of time, fragments of words, fragments of feelings. Make sense of me. Make me whole. — Greg Egan

A recent survey of 2,000 male graduates of Harvard Business School
found that penis length & IQ were equally good predictors of annual
income.
from Eugene — Greg Egan

It was the kind of behavior that could only occur when
people had been trapped for thousands of years, staring at the
same sights, fetishizing everything around them, spiraling
down toward the full-blown insanity of religion. You didn't
need gates and barbed wire to make a prison. Familiarity could
pin you to the ground, far more efficiently. — Greg Egan

That's all I am, now. That's all that defines me. So when they're happy, they'll be me. — Greg Egan

Because sex, drugs, and religion all hinge on the same kind of simple neurochemical events: addictive, euphoric, exhilirating - and all, equally, meaningless. — Greg Egan

There was no truth in anything he said, anything he believed. It was all just an expression of his own needs. — Greg Egan

He was a bridger. He created you to touch other cultures. He wanted you to reach as far as you could. — Greg Egan

Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything. Still, — Greg Egan

How do you know which parts of the world are you, in the polises?' 'Are there citizens in Konishi who eat music?' 'Is not having a body like falling all the time, without moving? — Greg Egan

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. — Greg Egan

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. — Greg Egan