Rudy Rucker Quotes & Sayings

Somehow I fell asleep in the graveyard. — Rudy Rucker

At present, however, I don't think the Net is a very good medium for books, books should really be inexpensive lightweight paperbacks you can bang around. — Rudy Rucker

One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments. — Rudy Rucker

Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it's done, keep sending it out for quite awhile. — Rudy Rucker

Death is simple, but my evasions are complex. — Rudy Rucker

Selling a book or story has never become absolutely automatic for me. — Rudy Rucker

It's a waste to chase the pipe dream of a magical tiny theory that allows us to make quick and detailed calculations about the future. We can't predict and we can't control. To accept this can be a source of liberation and inner peace. We're part of the unfolding world, surfing the chaotic waves. — Rudy Rucker

No one can point to the fourth dimension, yet it is all around us. — Rudy Rucker

If all else fails, there's always print or web zines. — Rudy Rucker

A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules. — Rudy Rucker

There are no normal people - just look at your relatives, — Rudy Rucker

The Pig Chef was - if you thought about it - one of the more sinister icons of American roadside art. Danny's personal totem. What kind of pig is a butcher? What kind of pig cooks barbeque? A traitor pig, a killer pig, a doomed preterite pig destined for eternal damnation. Danny's Pig Chefs showed the full weight of this knowledge in their mocking eyes and snaggled snouts. — Rudy Rucker

If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite abundantly clear that there's not going to be a final answer and there won't be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation halt! — Rudy Rucker

If we suppose that many natural phenomena are in effect computations, the study of computer science can tell us about the kinds of natural phenomena that can occur. — Rudy Rucker

America isn't young, you know. It's ancient and evil. With aluminum siding. — Rudy Rucker

All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected. — Rudy Rucker

The churning of a human mind is unpredictable, as is the anatomy of the human heart. — Rudy Rucker

Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens. — Rudy Rucker

Even if we become glowing clouds of ectoplasm, there's going to be something we're competing for - and most of us will feel as though we're getting screwed. — Rudy Rucker

Once you're born, the worst has already happened. — Rudy Rucker

Our bodies are the time machine. — Rudy Rucker

Long live transfinite mountains, the hollow earth, time machines, fractal writing, aliens, dada, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space, teleportation, artificial reality, robots, pod people, hylozoism, endless shrinking, intelligent goo, antigravity, surrealism, software highs, two-dimensional time, gnarly computation, the art of photo composition, pleasure zappers, nanomachines, mind viruses, hyperspace, monsters from the deep and, of course, always and forever, the attack of the giant ants! — Rudy Rucker

In any case, A New Kind of Science is a wonderful book, and I'm still absorbing its teachings. — Rudy Rucker

As Aquinas, the quintessential theologian, says: "The notion of form is most fully realized in existence itself. And in God existence is not acquired by anything, but God is existence itself subsistent. It is clear, then, that God himself is both limitless and perfect."28 — Rudy Rucker

The study of infinity is much more than a dry academic game. The intellectual pursuit of the absolute infinity is, as Georg Cantor realized, a form of the soul's quest for God. Whether or not the goal is ever reached, an awareness of the process brings enlightenment. — Rudy Rucker

The world is magic. Science is but an insipid style of sorcery. — Rudy Rucker

This is like the joke where the guy climbs the mountain and asks the guru, 'What is the secret of life?,' and the guru says, 'All is One,' and the guys says, 'Are you kidding?,' and the guru says, 'You mean it isn't? — Rudy Rucker

Intellectually, perspective [drawing] is a breakthrough, because here, for the first time, the physical space we live in is being depicted as ifit were an abstract, mathematical space. A less obvious innovation due to perspective is that here, for the first time, people are actually drawing pictures of infinities. — Rudy Rucker

Think of a field of daisies: they bloom, they wither, and in the spring they grow again. Who wants to see the same stupid daisy year after year, especially with a bunch of crappy iron-lung-type equipment bolted to it? — Rudy Rucker

The hard fact is that not everyone does get published. — Rudy Rucker

Traditional science is all about finding shortcuts. — Rudy Rucker

I like to do things that are surprising and different. — Rudy Rucker

What is the shape of space? Is it flat, or is it bent? Is it nicely laid out, or is it warped and shrunken? Is it finite, or is it infinite? Which of the following does space resemble more: (a) a sheet of paper, (b) an endless desert, (c) a soap bubble, (d) a doughnut, (e) an Escher drawing, (f) an ice cream cone, (g) the branches of a tree, or (h) a human body? — Rudy Rucker

Electronic distribution is more of a fall-back strategy for putting out a book that isn't deemed profitable enough to print. You hardly make any money publishing an electronic book. — Rudy Rucker

I was strange to keep waking up in the morning feeling good. — Rudy Rucker

I think you should kill him and eat his brain," Mr. Frostee said quickly.
That's not the answer to every problem in interpersonal relations," Cobb said, hopping out. — Rudy Rucker

Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail. — Rudy Rucker

I like a book better if I can't predict what's going to happen. — Rudy Rucker

The simple process of eating and breathing weave all of us together into a vast four-dimensional array. No matter how isolated you may sometimes feel, no matter how lonely, you are never really cut off from the whole. — Rudy Rucker

Let the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil fall, soundless in the moldering woods. — Rudy Rucker

We're presently in the midst of a third intellectual revolution. The first came with Newton: the planets obey physical laws. The second came with Darwin: biology obeys genetic laws. In today's third revolution, were coming to realize that even minds and societies emerge from interacting laws that can be regarded as computations. Everything is a computation. — Rudy Rucker

But how does it feel to plug into a system that's say, a million times as smart as a person. — Rudy Rucker

I am indeed a kind of alien," siad Momo. "Your legends do not entirely miss the mark. We do have ray guns and flying saucers. But my homeland is not one of your space's planets. I'm from the All, Joe Cube. A world of four dimensions. I climbed down through a tunnel to get to Spaceland- to your world. Spaceland lies in an endless cavern like a strange, subterranean sea. Spaceland very nearly lacks a fourth dimension; it extends less than a nanometer in the direction of your vinn and vout- which actually point in the direction of our up and down. Spaceland appears to us as something like a rug- but unlike a rug, Spsaceland is cunningly filled with motion and life. It seems the Creator put Spaceland in place to separate the All in two. My people the Kluppers, live up above it, and another fold called the Dronners live down below. They are our enemies, hidden below Spaceland." Momo paused, as if agitated by the thought of the Dronners. "You'll turn the tide against them Joe. — Rudy Rucker

But Onar turned out to be a poor lover, certainly the worst of Yoke's
few partners thus far. Onar stinted on the foreplay, made a long messy
fuss of his prophylactic preparations, and was up for at most sixty
seconds of actual coitus. As a final turn-off, Onar said something British
when he came, something like "Cor blimey," or "Top drawer," or "Bit of
all right" - Yoke's outraged brain disdained to retain the phrase. — Rudy Rucker

The world is colors and motion, feelings and thoughts and what does math have to do with it? Not much, if 'math' means being bored in high school, but in truth mathematics is the one universal science. Mathematics is the study of pure pattern and everything in the cosmos is a kind of pattern. — Rudy Rucker

For me, the best thing about Cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just imagine the whole thing is two miles below the moon's surface, and that half the people's right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly it's interesting again. — Rudy Rucker

It's tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that's not particularly good and after about half an hour you know how it's going to end. — Rudy Rucker

I am, as it were, an eye that the cosmos uses to look at itself. The Mind is not mine alone; the Mind is everywhere. — Rudy Rucker

Everything is cellular. Reality is cellular. I really love that word, cellular. Cellular phone, cellular foam, sleeper cell, cellulite, cellular automata . . . A cell can be anything! . . . It's cellular. It's quantum dots. It's quantum and cellular and bosonic. It's bosonic cellular quantum dottiness. With ribbons on." -- Jimmy Ganzer, 'Good Night, Moon — Rudy Rucker

The basic idea is simple: All is One. Different religions just find different ways of expressing this universal truth. — Rudy Rucker

In principle you could hypertunnel from a Zone B world, but in practice you
can't get the tech together. The evil rays revel in chaotic class-three
and class-four zones.
Rudy Rucker, story notes, Mathies in Love — Rudy Rucker

When I see an old movie, like from the '40s or '50s or '60s, the people look so calm. They don't have smartphones, they're not looking at computer screens, they're taking their time. They'll sit in a chair and just stare off into space. I think some day we'll find our way back to that garden of Eden. — Rudy Rucker

A little-known truth: Every aspect of the world is fundamentally unpredictable. Computer scientists have long since proved this. — Rudy Rucker

It's soothing to realize that my mind's processes are inherently uncontrollable. — Rudy Rucker

I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end. — Rudy Rucker

Some ideas you have to chew on, then roll them around a lot, play with them before you can turn them into funky science fiction. — Rudy Rucker

Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way. — Rudy Rucker

Unfortunately our nation, nay, our world, is run by evil morons. — Rudy Rucker

Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation. — Rudy Rucker