Paolo Bacigalupi Quotes

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  • Writer
  • born 1972
  • 111 quotes

Paolo Bacigalupi, a writer (born 1972), is quoted 111 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are Stories, Men, Law and Ocean.

Quotes with a ready-made image come first, then the rest in order of how often they are read and shared. Open any quote to copy it, share it, or turn it into a picture quote.

Blood is not destiny.

The future looks a bit bleak to me.

An untrampled scorpion troubles no one.

A desert's a stupid place to put a river.

Men are loyal when you lead from the front.

I like fast plots with things that explode.

I'm less crazy and unhappy when I'm writing.

Suicide is not something I owe you or yours.

Sex and hypocrisy. They go together like coffee and cream.

Debts are a heavy burden. Throw them off, and you walk free.

Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way of justice.

If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.

Politics is ugly. Never doubt what small men will do for great power.

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

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

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

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

Life is exponential. Two becomes four, becomes ten thousand, becomes a plague.

Laws are a fine thing on paper, but painful when no bribery can ease their bind.

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

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

Knowledge is always two-edged. For every benefit, there is hazard. For every good, evil.

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

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

We write dust epitaphs for our vanquished enemies and watch them blow away in the desert wind.

They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.

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

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

Science fiction has these obsessions with certain sciences - large scale engineering, neuroscience.

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

The conclusion I came to was that even if I couldn't sell books, I still liked the process of writing.

The young adult category is particularly interesting to me in terms of science fiction and fantasy tropes.

But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.

Nature has become something new. It is ours now, truly. And if our creation devours us, how poetic will that be?

The surfeit of bad trends pushes me to set my stories in worlds which are often diminished versions of our own present.

The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.

I'm a chess piece. A pawn,' she said. 'I can be sacrificed, but I cannot be captured. To be captured would be the end of the game.

Mostly I sat down and said, 'I'm not going to write a boring story.' And that actually, surprisingly, solves most of your problems.

I'm interested in how we react when we're heavily pressed. When we're vulnerable and our survival is in question, how do we behave?

The main reason I want someone to read a story of mine is so they can enjoy it and feel like they got something interesting out of it.

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

I'm particularly interested in black swan events: unprecedented surprises that destroy the conventional wisdom about how the world works.

I suspect that young adults crave stories of broken futures because they themselves are uneasily aware that their world is falling apart.

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.

The marketplace tells us that good, visceral storytelling has a place. But there are lots of questions about the format that stories take.

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.

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

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.

As a writer, you should care about reluctant readers. You want these kids to feel like books are amazing and cool and that they're an escape.

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 is quoted on

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