Alastair Reynolds Quotes

I don't understand and don't enjoy sci-fi, and it's just that if people aren't real, and they don't live in a real and recognizable society, I don't understand what to do.

The problem is that it is difficult to translate.

I think we invent jargon because it saves times talking to one-another.

I just don't like big guys who speak cryptically and act like they understand the language better than me.

It is not easy to write a familiar style. Many people mistake a familiar for a vulgar style, and suppose that to write without affectation is to write at random. On the contrary, there is nothing that requires more precision, and, if I may so say, purity of expression, than the style I am speaking of. It utterly rejects not only all unmeaning pomp, but all low, cant phrases, and loose, unconnected, slipshod allusions. It is not to take the first word that offers, but the best word in common use; it is not to throw words together in any combinations we please, but to follow and avail ourselves of the true idiom of the language.

I’m bilingual. I speak English and I speak educationese.

Emotion' is a strange word.

George Orwell once blamed the demise of the English language on politics. It's quite possible he never read a prospectus.

Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.

Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.

Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.

I never go on the net or the web, or whatever it's called.

When I think of New York I have a very different feeling. New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance. New York is cold, glittering, malign. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit. A constant ferment, but it might just as well be going on in a test tube. Nobody knows what it's all about. Nobody directs the energy. Stupendous. Bizarre, Baffling. A tremendous reactive urge, but absolutely uncoordinated.

The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.

Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world.

Many errors, of a truth, consist merely in the application of the wrong names of things.

Looking at a first assembly is kind of like looking at an overgrown garden. You can't just wade in with a weed whacker; you don't yet know where the stems of the flowers are.

Because of his capacity for abstract communications and language and his ability to enter in imagination into the lives of others, man is able to build organizations of a size and complexity far beyond those of the lower animals.

Billy [Ray] is a preternatural enthusiast. He would say things to me like, "Now, let me tell you about Episode 3." I'm a big superstitious, having done television for quite some time, and I would say, "Billy, I can't wait to hear about it, but let's just stay here for right now, see what happens, and enjoy this moment.

Lately, I feel like my life is a book written in a language I don't know how to read.

I guess...on one hand, I spent way too much time watching science fiction and reading science fiction when I was growing up. But a part of it is I also never felt much of a connection to the world in which I lived while I was growing up, and so, oddly enough, I think I felt a lot more connected to the worlds that I read about in science fiction.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

When I hear the word independent I reach for my revolver. At this point, what the hell does that mean? The English Patient is an independent film... Hootie and the Blowfish are alternative music. I'm the Queen of Denmark. I don't know what it means anymore.

There are things that don't deserve to be said briefly.

Please do not understand me too quickly.