Ernest Cline Quotes - Page 2

I felt like a kid standing in the world's greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play.

I've been invited to speak at about 20 colleges. There's always this moment when I'm having dinner with the college president: 'Ernie, where'd you go to school?'

I was one of the boys who made passes at girls who wore glasses. Any girl who was smarter than me - that was a huge turn-on.

Continue your quest by taking the test. Yes, but what test? What test was I supposed to take? The Kobayashi Maru? The Pepsi Challenge? Could the clue have been any more vague?

I wanted to be able to write in the voice that I talk to my friends and assume that everybody would know what I was talking about.

It's so much better to hand over a finished book than having all these people waiting.

I feel like I was hit by all of geek culture at once while I was growing up in the '70s and '80s. Saturday morning cartoons like 'Star Blazers' and 'Robotech.' Live action Japanese shows like 'Ultraman' and 'The Space Giants.'

Very well! he said. You shall prove your worth by facing me in a joust! I'd never heard of an undead lich king challenging someone to a joust. Especially not in a subterranean burial chamber. All right, I said uncertainly. But won't we be needing horses for that? Not horses, he replied, stepping away from his throne. Birds.

I never ran out of ammo, because each time I fired a round, a new round was teleported into the bottom of the clip. My bullet bill this month was going to be huge.

It is on!" Aech shouted into his comlink. "it is on like Red Dawn!

I have to avoid things like 'World of Warcraft' or 'Minecraft', otherwise I'd never get any work done.

I've retroactively made all that wasted time rotting my brain into research. It makes me a hypocrite when I try to tell my own daughter, "I don't know, I think we've played a little too much Mario."

My characters are all kind of geek archetypes of people I've encountered at gaming and comic book conventions.

I've never really collected anything other than old Atari cartridges. I only had, like, 12 Atari games as a kid, so at some point in my 20s I decided I was going to own all of them.

The clans began to bombard the outer force field with rockets, missiles, nukes, and harsh language.

I've wanted to own a DeLorean since I was 10 years old, but it always seemed like a silly daydream. Like owning the "A-Team" van or something.

I burned through all of my extra lives in a matter of minutes, and my two least-favorite words appeared on the screen: GAME OVER.

Virtual sex, no matter how realistic, was really nothing but glorified, computer-assisted masturbation.

I was just starting out, trying to become a screenwriter, and I became the Austin slam champion three times. For a nerdy, kind of a socially awkward guy, that did wonders for my self esteem.

Everybody uses pop culture as a shorthand.

As far as my house, I have a ton of video games and three or four old consoles.

"Lights," I said softly. This had become my favorite word over the past week. In my mind, it had become synonymous with freedom.

I noticed in the late 1990s that my friends and I were already nostalgic for the 1980s, and by the turn of the century, VH1's 'I Love the '80s' gave all of us an accelerated nostalgia for our generation.

My favorite video game of all time is called 'Black Tiger'. It's a Capcom Dungeons and Dragons game from 1987. I have the actual arcade version sitting in my office.

In the far reaches of the world, under a lost and lonely hill, lies the TOMB OF HORRORS. This labyrinthine crypt is filled with terrible traps, strange and ferocious monsters, rich and magical treasures, and somewhere within rests the evil DemiLich.