Vernor Vinge Quotes

The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you don’t always get what you thought you were asking for.

Les enfants sont des créatures extraordinaires, quand ils ne sont pas simplement chiants.

All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.

Tycoon had a peddler's talent for using words to redefine reality.

The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?

He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.

Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories.

Second by second, the Queng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.

Most civilizations had more fiction than they did real history.

Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.

Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.