Bacigalupi Paolo Quotes & Sayings

I don't care. I want that one out. We can't afford a stampede. Find some polite way to get rid of him." Anderson pulls over another stack of paychecks waiting for his signature.
Hock Seng tries again. "Khun, negotiating with the union is a complicated thing."
"That's why I have you. It's called delegating." Anderson continues flipping the papers.
"Yes, of course." Hock Seng regards him drily. "Thank you for your management instruction. — Paolo Bacigalupi

I am interested in agricultural corporations and how they function. The idea that they own the genetics of our food supply is a really compelling thing to me. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way if justice. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Mahlia knew the many voices of war from her father's chant. — Paolo Bacigalupi

It is a precise thing, a scripted act as deliberate as Jo No Mai, each move choreographed, a worship of scarcity. — Paolo Bacigalupi

At some point, you realize you can't provide a perfectly monolithic description of a foreign culture's future any more than you can provide a monolithic description of your own hometown's future. Your choices about what to emphasize and what to leave out make all the difference, and ultimately, your fingerprints and biases and viewpoints are going to be all over the story. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Hell, we're all bullet bait sooner or later. Doubt it makes much difference. You make it to sixteen, you're a goddamn legend. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Most of the news about the state of the environment is pretty ugly. This is frightening for me personally, but actually motivational for me artistically. — Paolo Bacigalupi

I think the fact that we, as writers, don't engage with resource-level questions is a symptom of our society where we just don't know where our stuff comes from. — Paolo Bacigalupi

We're all happier when we know less, because the details are frightening and haven't really improved much. The more you pay attention, the more horrifying the world is. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Everyone in China knows The Topics. The television stations and newspapers run the same state-generated stories all across the country, and the Chinese form their opinions based on these somewhat controlled sources. — Paolo Bacigalupi

The more you read about and immerse in a culture, the more it comes alive, and the more textured and nuanced and detailed and unstereotypable it becomes. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Maggot twitch, some people called it. If you'd seen much of the war, you had it. Some more. Some less. But everybody had it. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Lock it away," the half-man whispered. "You feel, after. Not now. Now you are a soldier. Now you do your duty for your pack. If you break, your Mouse will die, and you with him. Feel, after. Not now. — Paolo Bacigalupi

A wise human would have an understanding of the supply chain and how the pieces fit together. But it's against our nature to think about it. — Paolo Bacigalupi

There were stories in sweat.

The sweat of a woman bend double in an onion field, working fourteen hours under the hot sun, was different from the sweat of a man as he approached a checkpoint in Mexico, praying to La Santa Muerte that the federales weren't on the payroll of the enemies he was fleeing...
Sweat was a body's history, compressed into jewels, beaded on the brow, staining shirts with salt. It told you everything about how a person had ended up in the right place at the wrong time, and whether they would survive another day. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Mouse took an idle whack at some kudzu as he passed, but his face was serious. "Hell, I don't know. Why do you care? That was right after our farm burned. They got everyone. Mom and Dad. Simon. Shane got recruited. I saw that. They shot Simon because he was too little, but they took Shane." He knocked aside more kudzu. "Maybe I was hoping they'd just shoot me and get it over with. I was so sick of hiding and scavenging. I think I wanted the bullet. — Paolo Bacigalupi

If I could put my finger on the moment we genuinely fucked ourselves, it was the moment we decided that data was something you could use words like believe or disbelieve around." He — Paolo Bacigalupi

For me as a kid, reading cyberpunk was like seeing the world for the first time. Gibson's Neuromancer wasn't just stylistically stunning; it felt like the template for a future that we were actively building. I remember reading Sterling's Islands in the Net and suddenly understanding the disruptive potential of technology once it got out into the street. Cyberpunk felt urgent. It wasn't the future 15 minutes out-it was the future sideswiping you and leaving you in a full-body cast as it passed by. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Fiction is optimistic or unrealistic enough to demand that there should be a meaningful narrative. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Tool glanced over his shoulder, looking to see if the girl might have changed her mind, but she was gone. Swallowed up by the land. The Drowned Cities ate its children. — Paolo Bacigalupi

"Why are you so nice? It doesn't make sense. I'm not your woman. I'm not your people"
"We're all each other's people. Just like we're all our brothers' keepers. We forget it sometimes. When everything's going to pieces, people can forget. But in the end? We're all in it together ... "
"I used to know this Indian guy ... the thing he said that stuck with me was that people are one here in America. They're all alone. And they don't trust anyone except themselves, and they don't rely on anyone except themselves. He said that was why he thought India would survive all this apocalyptic shit, but America wouldn't. Because here, no knew their neighbors." He laughed at that. "I can still remember his head wagging back and forth, 'No one is knowing their neighbors. — Paolo Bacigalupi

As an author, you're really grateful for the people who are supporting you, but on some other level, that can be a dangerous echo chamber. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Economies are embedded inside ecosystems. Companies dependent on tourism, for example, are affected by low rainfall - there's less snow for skiers, and forest fires are more intense. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Anderson takes a shuddering breath, forcing away the memories. She is the opposite of the invasive plagues he fights every day. A hothouse flower, dropped into a world too harsh for her delicate heritage. It seems unlikely that she will survive for long. Not in this climate. Not with these people. Perhaps it was that vulnerability that moved him, her pretended strength when she had nothing at all. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Short fiction seems more targeted - hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it's a lot smokier and less defined. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Her father would return from China. He'd come back with all his soldiers. He'd pick her up in his strong arms and say that he'd never meant to leave, that he hadn't meant to sail away and leave her and her mother alone in the canals of the Drowned Cities as the Army of God and the UPF and the Freedom Militia came down like a hammer on every single person who'd ever trafficked with the peacekeepers. A stupid little dream for a stupid little war maggot. Mahlia hated herself for dreaming it. But sometimes she curled in on herself and held the stump of her right hand to her chest and pretended that none of it had happened. That her father was still here, and she still had a hand, and everything was going to get better. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Knowing all and having the necessary tools are two different things. This is hardly a hospital. We make do with what we have, and none of that is Mahlia's fault. Tani is the victim of many evils, but Mahlia is not the beginning of that chain, nor the end. I am responsible, if anyone is. — Paolo Bacigalupi

When an animal spoke, you were supposed to pay attention. — Paolo Bacigalupi

I say I write extrapolations. I look at data points and ask what the world could look like. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Teens want to read something that isn't a lie; we adults wish we could put our heads under the blankets and hide from the scary story we're writing for our kids. — Paolo Bacigalupi

When we talk about dystopias, especially in young adult fiction, a lot of them are essentially science fictional futures. They aren't necessarily tied to the traditional concept of dystopia. And so in that space, my impression is that kids love reading about weird, wild, adventurous places, and dystopia fits that bill. — Paolo Bacigalupi

If we are pack, then conquest is our sustenance, sister.
He plunged his hand into the coywolv's frame. With a wet tearing, the heart came out, glistening and full of blood, veins and arteries torn. The muscle of life. Tool held it out to her. "Our enemies give us strength." Blood ran from his fist. Mahlia saw the challenge in the half-man's eye.
She limped over to the battle-scarred monster and held out her hand. The heart was surprisingly heavy as Tool poured it into her palm. She lifted the muscle to her lips and bit deep.
Blood ran down her chin. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Language is how we hack other people's brains. It's how we make them see things the way we want them to see them. — Paolo Bacigalupi

I think that we live in a highly specialized, technologically advanced society. Highly developed societies tend to have very remote understandings about what underlies our prosperity. — Paolo Bacigalupi

I used to work for a newspaper that covered local resource issues, and my coworkers and friends were journalists. Their reporting work was always pretty grim. — Paolo Bacigalupi

When people fight for ideals, no price is too high, and no fight can be surrendered. They aren't fighting for money, or power, or control. Not really. They're fighting to destroy their enemies. — Paolo Bacigalupi

By nature I'm sort of an introvert. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Life is algorithmic. Two becomes four, becomes ten thousand, becomes a plague. Maybe it's everywhere in the population already and we never noticed. Maybe this is end-stage. Terminal without symptoms, like poor Kip."
Kanya glances at the ladyboy. Kip gives a gentle return smile. Nothing shows on her skin. Nothing shows on her body. It is not the doctor's disease she dies of. And yet ... Kanya steps away, involuntarily.
The doctor grins. "Don't look so worried. You have the same sickness. Life is, after all, inevitably fatal. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Soldiers have been looting and burning for generations. Perhaps they burned the town because of you, or perhaps they did it because they disliked the whiskey. Soldiers kill and rape and loot for a thousand reasons. The one thing I am certain of is that neither you nor I did this burning." Tool reached down and turned Mahlia's gaze to meet his own. "Do not seek to own what others have done. — Paolo Bacigalupi

She smiles at him, too young to know him for a stranger, and too innocent yet to care. — Paolo Bacigalupi

I don't need books about how things used to be. Everybody talks about how things used to be. I need a book about how I'm supposed to live now. Unless you got a book like that, I don't need the weight. She — Paolo Bacigalupi

No one else could see all the bodies she'd left behind, but they were there, looking at her. Or maybe that was just her, looking at herself, and not liking what she saw. Knowing she could never escape her own judging gaze. — Paolo Bacigalupi

You can't know its mind, and you can't control it. This creature is nothing but war incarnate. If you traffic with it, you bring war into your house, and violence down upon yourself. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Your body is full of rage. Every sinew. It is easy to read. You speak volumes with a clenched fist. — Paolo Bacigalupi

I like fast plots with things that explode. — Paolo Bacigalupi

When I read, I'm either reading to learn, or I'm reading to switch off. — Paolo Bacigalupi

It was a view of the world that anticipated evil from people because people always delivered. And the worst part was that she couldn't really argue. — Paolo Bacigalupi

We waste all our money throwing dice, trying to get close to Luck, trying to get the big win ... To help us find something we can keep for ourselves. — Paolo Bacigalupi

No one else noticed, or cared. It was just something they did. Taking other people's livestock. Other people's lives. She watched the soldiers, hating them. They were different in so many ways, white and black, yellow and brown, skinny, short, tall, small, but they were all the same. Didn't matter if they wore finger-bone necklaces, or baby teeth on bracelets, or tattoos on their chests to ward off bullets. In the end, they were all mangled with battle scars and their eyes were all dead. — Paolo Bacigalupi

A final stand, then. One last battle. At least he could say that he had fought. When he met his brothers and sisters on the far side of death, he would tell them that he had not yielded. He might have betrayed everything that they had been bred for, but he had never yielded. — Paolo Bacigalupi

We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your potential fully upon it. — Paolo Bacigalupi

We're so few in comparison to the past, where did all the souls go? — Paolo Bacigalupi

Despite everything, he failed to understand the capriciousness of warfare. In his arrogance he thought he could prepare. Such a fool... — Paolo Bacigalupi

As far as 'Windup Girl' becoming a hit - none of us expected that. 'Night Shade' was just hoping not to lose their shirts, and I had grown up hearing from everyone that science fiction didn't sell, so all of our expectations were very low. — Paolo Bacigalupi

How did you find truth when everyone was talking about sides? — Paolo Bacigalupi

I do not fight battles that cannot be won. Do not confuse that with cowardice. — Paolo Bacigalupi

It's the first rule of bureaucracy: any message worth sending is worth sending in triplicate. — Paolo Bacigalupi

It's human nature to tear one another apart. Be glad you come from such a successful line of killers. — Paolo Bacigalupi

I know people who have gone into career death spins, and that's something you're always aware of as a writer. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Jesus walked on water, so maybe he makes aquifers, too. — Paolo Bacigalupi

The loneliest Chinese man I ever met lived halfway up the Three Gorges, in Sichuan Province. — Paolo Bacigalupi

If I was strategic, I would have figured out how to get out of this place. Would have seen everything falling apart and got out while there were still ships to sail. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Suicide is not something I owe you or yours. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Food should come from the place of its origin, and stay there. It shouldn't spend its time crisscrossing the globe for the sake of profit. — Paolo Bacigalupi

In the distance, a building explodes in flame. She has over a hundred men working this district, letting everyone feel the pain of real enforcement. Laws are a fine thing on paper, but painful when no bribery can ease their bind. People have forgotten this. — Paolo Bacigalupi

which general has decided to betray Pracha. — Paolo Bacigalupi

The idea made Mahlia's chest tighten. It was her own fantasy, the secret one she sometimes curled up to when she went to bed, knowing that it was stupid, but still wanting it, wanting it to somehow all make sense. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Down an alley a washing woman has set out laundry in pans near the rubble of an old high-rise. Another is washing her body, carefully scrubbing under her sarong, its fabric clinging to her skin. Children run naked through the dirt, jumping over bits of broken concrete that were laid down more than a hundred years ago in the old Expansion. Far down the street the levees rise, holding back the sea. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Some things, it was better not to think about. It just made you mad and angry. — Paolo Bacigalupi

She'd survived the Drowned Cities because she wasn't anything like Mouse. When the bullets started flying and warlords started making examples of peacekeeper collaborators, Mahlia had kept her head down, instead of standing up like Mouse. She'd looked out for herself, first. And because of that, she'd survived. — Paolo Bacigalupi

That is the nature of our beasts and plagues. They are not dumb machines to be driven about. They have their own needs and hungers. Their own evolutionary demands. They must mutate and adapt, and so you will never be done with me, and when I am gone, what will you do then? We have released demons upon the world, and your walls are only as good as my intellect. Nature has become something new. It is ours now, truly. And if our creation devours us, how poetic will that be? — Paolo Bacigalupi

There are parents who are really angry that I decided to portray people who have come into the country illegally as decent human beings. — Paolo Bacigalupi

A gamble. Everything was a damn gamble. Betting against luck and the Fates, again and again, and again. She kept walking, waiting for the bullet. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Belief." He snorted. "I could kiss a thousand crosses. Fucking belief. — Paolo Bacigalupi

I used to love reading, but since I've started writing, it's harder for me to immerse, because I spend so much time looking at how the story is structured and trying to see what the author is doing behind the curtain. — Paolo Bacigalupi

It's still a load. If there was balance, the soldier boys would all be dead, and we'd be sitting pretty in the middle of the Drowned Cities, shipping marble and steel and copper and getting paid Red Chinese for every kilo. We'd be rich and they'd be dead, if there was such a thing as the Scavenge God, or his scales. And that goes double for the Deepwater priests. They're all full of it. Nothing balances out. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Of course, the more you read, the more you learn, and ultimately there is more information than you can ever use. The difficulty is that as an outsider, you know you're too ignorant for your own good, and so the urge to keep researching and *never* start writing is pretty strong. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Running. She was always running. Like a rabbit chased by coywolv. Always hunting for some new safe bolt hole, and every time, the soldier boys found her, and forced her to rabbit again. The doctor was wrong. There was no place to hide, and she'd never be safe as long as she remained close to the Drowned Cities. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Save your shaming for the girl, Doctor. If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago." He turned and started wading into the swamp. "Time is passing. I, for one, have no intention of remaining here for your betrayer to bring back the soldiers and their guns. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Businesses that decide to be reality based and identify where they're vulnerable to climate impact, that start thinking about how to buffer against it, are going to be able to take advantage of shortages. When the water runs out, not everyone is in the same pickle. — Paolo Bacigalupi

I think there are narratives going on all the time that we think of as tangential - up until they turn out to be deciding factors in our lives. — Paolo Bacigalupi

The Drowned Cities hadn't always been broken. People broke it. First they called people traitors and said they didn't belong. Said these people were good and those people were evil, and it kept going, because people always responded, and pretty soon the place was a roaring hell because no one took responsibility for what they did, and how it would drive others to respond. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Knowledge is simply a terrible ocean we must cross, and hope that wisdom lies on the other side. — Paolo Bacigalupi

You know what? No. I don't give a damn about the lies. Lies are fine. Truth. Lies. One way or the other, at least - " She broke off again, shaking her head. "It's not the lies. It's the silence. Silence is what gets me. All the things you don't say. All the words you don't write. That gets to you. After a while it just kills you. All the stories you teach yourself not to tell. All the truth and lies that you never ever print because all of it is too dangerous. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Crew up, Nailer!" Lucky Girl shouted. "You think I'm going to pull your ass up here like a damn swank? — Paolo Bacigalupi

I focus a little more on pacing when I write books in the young adult category, and of course there's the great American fear of anything sexual, so that's somewhat backed off in YA. — Paolo Bacigalupi

It only takes a few politicians to stoke division, or a few demagogues encouraging hatred to set your kind upon one another. And then before you know it, you have a whole nation biting on its own tail, going round and round until there is nothing left but the snapping of teeth. — Paolo Bacigalupi

You're afraid to gamble even when you're already dead — Paolo Bacigalupi

Originally, 'The Windup Girl' started as a short story - a very gnarly, complicated short story set in Bangkok that didn't work very well. — Paolo Bacigalupi

All the definitions people want to put on you in terms of what kind of writer you are come with hidden meanings. If you're writing science fiction, you're writing rocket ships. If you write dystopian fiction, it's inequity where The Man must be fought. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They'd played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They'd pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they'd turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans
vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They'd had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming. — Paolo Bacigalupi

If we can't describe our reality accurately, we can't see it. — Paolo Bacigalupi

When somebody keeps telling you, 'This book is amazing,' you sort of have this pleasing instinct to say, 'Oh, let me make you happy again; let me do that trick again.' — Paolo Bacigalupi

Her whispering lips brushed his ear.
She was praying. Soft begging words to Ganesha and the Buddha, to Kali-Mary Mercy and the Christian God...she was praying to anything at all, begging the Fates to let her walk from the shadow of death. Pleas spilled from her lips, a desperate trickle. She was broken, soon to die, but still the words slipped out in a steady whisper. Tum Karuna ke saagar Tum palankarta hail Mary full of grace Ajahn Chan Bodhisattva, release me from suffering...
He drew away. Her fingers slipped from his cheek like orchid petals falling. — Paolo Bacigalupi

You get worked up about what's right and wrong, but that shit's only in your head. Rules are what the big dogs say they are. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Doctor Mahfouz was always yammering on about how everyone had humanity in them. From Mahlia's experience, the doctor was sliding high, but now, as she looked at this sergeant named Ocho, she wondered if there was some bit of softness in this hard scarred boy that she might be able to work. — Paolo Bacigalupi

The blood bond was nothing. It was the people that mattered. If they covered your back, and you covered theirs, then maybe that was worth calling family. Everything else was just so much smoke and lies. — Paolo Bacigalupi

When you were alone in the rising ocean, you grabbed whatever raft passed by. — Paolo Bacigalupi