Neal Stephenson Quotes

People in any organization, including bureaucrats and politicians, are always attached to the obsolete; the obsolescent; the things that should have worked but didn't; the things that once were productive and no longer are.

There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone.

You aren't what I expected. I wish you were. It'd be so much easier.

The pleasure of expecting enjoyment is often greater than that of obtaining it, and the completion of almost every wish is found a disappointment.

Books, shmooks, this sickness has got me wishing if I can ever get out of this I'll gladly become a millworker and shut my big mouth.

Sometimes when relationships end, you write an e-mail and say everything you wish you said. Sometimes you don't push send.

What I really wanted was the impossible.

There is an unraveling, a great unraveling that I believe is occurring. Not without its pain, not without its frustration. Perhaps the fundamentalism we see within America right now is in response to these changes. We fear change, and so we cling to what is known.

Give thanks for all that shows up in your life including the stuff that you perceive to be negative, the things that you wish wouldn't have happened. Don't take anything forgranted.

An adventure is something that while it's happening you wish it wasn't.

Foremost is the principle that the purpose of consumer research is to understand the customer's needs and wishes, and thus design product and service that will provide better living for him in the future. A second principle is that no one can guess the future loss of business from a dissatisfied customer.

You want the world to be what you want it to be, and sometimes the world doesn't want that.

Physics is very muddled again at the moment; it is much too hard for me anyway, and I wish I were a movie comedian or something like that and had never heard anything about physics!

After you have 250,000 people watching your stuff every day, obviously you're going to have a few people who are going to get a little bit obsessed with your content. But I've never experienced it in a negative way. Perhaps that's because I'm lucky. I guess for some people, they experience it in a negative way and that's how the movie portrayed it.

I let everybody else's negative energy feed on me a little.

Unless you can point to something that I have done or said that has changed the course of the public opinion in a negative way, you've got to check yourself sometimes and say, "Maybe I don't like the way that this thing is said, but it's expanding tolerance." If I said something that was shutting down something that was positive, call me out, but I don't really see me doing that.

I wish people would quit telling me to think. I think. Thinking's easy. It's not thinking that's hard.

Object-oriented design is the roman numerals of computing.

For my part, I wish all guns with their belongings and everything could be sent to hell, which is the proper place for their exhibition and use.

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

Sandry: "There has to be something we can do." Lark: "We're mages. We do what we can, but some problems are too big to fix." Sandry: "Then I wish I weren't a mage. What good is magic, if you can't use it to help people.

I almost wish I'd had the forethought to eat a tree myself.

Sometimes Howard [Cosell] makes me wish I was a dog and he was a fireplug.

It is essential to make oneself used to putting up with a little. Even the wealthy and the well provided are continually met and frustrated by difficult times and situations. It is in no man's power to have whatever he wants; but he has it in his power not to wish for what he hasn't got, and cheerfully make the most of the things that do come his way.

All men are selfish, brutal and inconsiderate--and I wish I could find one.