Neal Stephenson Quotes

A novel may take anywhere from two to five years to write and, in the end, you might manage a couple of thousand dollars on it, no more.

I read a script or I read a project or I read a novel and I know that I'm going to spend two to three years of my life with that, exclusively. So you better like it. There better be an honorable, real need to make that movie.

People love destroying mankind, for some strange reason. You make a movie about mankind's destruction, you're going to fill seats. People just love the idea. For a couple thousand years, we've been dreaming up how we're all going to disappear and fade away from this planet.

During a recent interview, President Obama revealed that his favorite movie this year was 'Boyhood.' It makes sense. If there's one thing Obama can identify with, it's aging several years over the course of a couple of hours.

The severest charge that can be brought against the Christian education of the Negro in the South during the last thirty years is the reckless way in which sap-headed young fellows, without ability, and, in some cases, without character, have been urged and pushed into the ministry.

The number of rooms in a fictional house should be inversely proportional to the years during which the couple living in that house enjoyed true happiness.

He [Taika Watiti] worked on this screenplay for a couple of years and just getting it right and the result is there. He's made really close to a perfect film [Hunt for the Wilderpeople]... Perfect as you can be.

Unless a woman has a decided pleasure and facility in teaching, an honest knowledge of everything she professes to impart, a liking for children, and, above all, a strong moral sense of her responsibility towards them, for her to attempt to enroll herself in the scholastic order is absolute profanation.

I suddenly became aware over the last couple of years that I'm in my sixties. I never thought about it. I thought I'd better start acting my age or find roles that are going to be interesting to me in the sexagenarian repertoire, because it's not what you do in your forties or fifties.

In terms of driving, I actually don't have a driver's license, and it's kind of ridiculous. I've lived in Los Angeles for a couple of years and just have somehow managed to avoid taking the test, which I did last week and failed. I couldn't find the honker. I felt bad about it, but it's just a little bit embarrassing, I guess, to be in this film and not have a license.

I'm living in Los Angeles for a couple of years. I've been a gypsy for quite a while. It'll come to an end. I'm going to come back to New York.

Part of our brand is that we're pretty understated in what we do. If you look at other technology companies, they might preannounce things, and it will be a couple years before they really happen, and they don't happen in the way they said they would.

You may make something you don't think is very important during your lifetime and it'll last for a thousand years.

I guess they have to label someone the sexiest person in the world, and it is always someone who is on telly even if it’s the weatherman. For a couple of years it was me and then it was someone else. It’s nicer being the sexiest man than the most ugly man. I live with it, and I don’t mind it, but I don’t go around with a big smile on my face everyday.

If someone were to tell me I had twenty years left, and ask me how I'd like to spend them, I'd reply 'Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.'

My career is based on the slow build of an audience based on putting on a good show live and putting out a record every couple of years. I was already doing really well in terms of my goals, to keep my fans coming back.

I changed my major to English and I went off to Fort Collins. And within the first couple of weeks, I noticed that they were having auditions for a production in their theater department. They were going to stage Jean Anouilh's Becket, which was a film I loved, with Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton. So I went down and auditioned, and I got the role. I got the Peter O'Toole part. So here I was, a 19-year-old playing King Henry.

In a couple of days, it will be 40 days, 40 hours, 40 years in the desert - 40 is fraught with meaning and symbolism.

When you're thinking about the rest of your life, you're never really thinking more than a couple years down the road.

Computer science is not as old as physics; it lags by a couple of hundred years. However, this does not mean that there is significantly less on the computer scientist's plate than on the physicist's: younger it may be, but it has had a far more intense upbringing!

This happens to me every couple of years. I'll look at someone I respect and I'll realize that he's outworking me. It changes the way I behave for the next half decade.

I mean, we've had Republican majorities in the House and even the Senate for a couple of years. How has that worked out, stopping [Barack] Obama, hmm? Seriously.

South America had been an island continent, far bigger and far more diverse than Australia, for tens of millions of years before the Isthmus of Panama rose just a couple of million years ago. The resulting flood of North American mammals across the new land bridge corresponds in time with the decimation of the native South American fauna. In fact, most large mammals generally considered distinctly South American... are all recent migrants from North America.