Paolo Bacigalupi Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Killing isn't free. It takes something out of you every time you do it. You get their life; they get a piece of your soul. It's always a trade.

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

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.

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

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.

The future looks a bit bleak to me.

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.

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

Men are loyal when you lead from the front.

Maybe because we're photosynthesizing we'll do more work outside. So our laptops will have to get rid of these damn glossy screens that have become so popular. And then we'll sit around outside, sucking up sun, getting fat and green, and surfing the net.

What I'm hoping to do though is to ground my extrapolations in specificity, and to make sure that the story I tell is deliberately and honestly told.

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.

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

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

Plenty of people say my guesses about a future drought in the western U.S. (where I live and grew up) are wrong, so I don't see why I won't be wrong in some people's eyes when I go set a story on foreign shores.

Environmental science is telling us a lot about our future and what it could look like, whether we're talking about global warming (the current poster child for the environment) or a loss of genetic diversity in our food supplies, or the effects of low-dose chemicals on human development.

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

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

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

They say in the military that a good battle plan can last as long as five minutes in real fighting. After that, it comes down to if the general is favored by fate and the spirits.