Greg Bear
58 quotes
Biography
"Ray Bradbury is, for many reasons, the most influential writer in my life. Throughout our long friendship, Ray supplied not only his terrific stories but a grand model of what a writer could be, should be, and yet rarely is: brilliant and charming and accessible, willing to tolerate and to teach, happy to inspire but also to be inspired."
"Once, poets were magicians. Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or kings — stronger than old hapless gods. And they will be strong once again."
"The hardest theme in science fiction is that of the alien. The simplest solution of all is in fact quite profound—that the real difficulty lies not in understanding what is alien, but in understanding what is self. We are all aliens to each other, all different and divided. We are even aliens to ourselves at different stages of our lives. Do any of us remember precisely what it was like to be a baby?"
"We're not prophets. We're not here to inform the rich people of the world on how to make more money, or to inform governments on how to direct themselves. We are here to allow you to dream your dreams and make them happen, and have your nightmares a little in advance so you can prevent them from happening."
"You deserve whoever governs you … Everyone is responsible for the actions of their leaders."
"There is nothing finer in the world than the telling of tales. Split atoms if you wish, but splitting an infinitive—and getting away with it—is far nobler. Lance boils if you wish, but pricking pretensions is often cleaner and always more fun."
"“Being scared is nothing,” the old woman said. “Being bored, or ignorant—now that’s a crime.”"
"The battle was over. There were no victors."
"To fight an enemy properly, you have to know what they are. Ignorance is defeat."
"When evenly matched, you cannot win against your enemy unless you understand them. And if you truly understand, why are you fighting and not talking?"
"She saw that in all wars, the first stage was to dehumanize the enemy, reduce the enemy to a lower level so that he might be killed without compunction. When the enemy was not human to begin with, the task was easier."
"We’ve been fighting for so long, we’ve begun to lose ourselves. And it’s getting worse."
"There is no war so important that to win it, we must destroy our minds."
"Around her gulps of water, she repeated her prayer, until the monotony and futility silenced her."
"Can’t own a woman, Mike. Wonderful companions, can’t own them."
"Information can be stored even more compactly than in molecular memory. It can be stored in the structure of space-time. What is matter, after all, but a standing-wave of information in the vacuum?"
"Sometimes I feel like a beetle crawling through a fusion power plant. I can feel a certain amount, see a certain amount, but I sure as hell don’t understand everything."
"Grief is not productive. It simply represents an inefficiency in accepting change of status."
"Having one’s eyes opened doesn’t make one grateful."
"Apocalypse could not be repealed by the democratic process."
"I sometimes think we deserve to die, we’re all so goddamned stupid."
"Life on earth is hard. Competition for the necessities of life is fierce. How ridiculous to believe that the law of harsh survival would not be true elsewhere, or that it would be negated by the progress of technology in an advanced civilization..."
"Altruism is masked self-interest. Aggressive self-interest is a masked urge to self-destruction."
"A Stellar’s jay hopped along behind him, watching closely for dropped crumbs. “It’s dark,” he told the bird. “Go to sleep. I've eaten already. Where were you? No food now.” The bird persisted, however; it knew humans were liars."
"More and more I am nothing without someone. To be alone is to be in bad company."