Neal Stephenson Quotes

Letters are things, not pictures of things.

Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.

It's been a long and tumultuous relationship between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz that started off more or less as allies during the Republican primary. As Trump took the early lead in polls, Cruz stuck with the strategy of drafting off of the front-runner waiting for the moment to make his move.

You don't rest well as long as you're seeking vengeance. I feel sad justice wasn't done, but it's time to move on and sleep well.

Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.

The anonymity issue is a big question. As long as people can disguise cyber attacks and as long as there is a sort of question mark over who is responsible, then the problem will continue to exist. And of course what happens in response to that is that there is a move to try and refashion the Internet so that anonymity is impossible, which of course leads to fears among all sorts of groups - civil rights groups, NGOs, and political parties - that the Internet is going to be used simply as a method of control. So these are very sensitive issues.

Black-Scholes works for short-term options, but if it's a long-term option and you think you know something [about the underlying asset], it's insane to use Black-Scholes.

In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.

There was so much good and different music back then and you'd just keep moving through it and discovering more new stuff. I went through my Black Sabbath phase before I even started playing guitar.

A movement with some lasting organization is a lot less dramatic than a movement with a lot of demonstrations and a lot of marching and so forth. The more dramatic organization does catch attention quicker. Over the long haul, however, it's a lot more difficult to keep together because you're not building solid...A lasting organization is one in which people will continue to build, develop and move when you are not there.

Nothing about human beings ever had the power to move me as a child. Black Beauty now ... !

No one for a moment can pretend that printing is so great a discovery as writing, or algebra as a language.

You just have to know what looks good on you. I say, focus on the body part that you feel most comfortable about. My legs don't change much so a good look for me is a short black dress with long sleeves. If you see me in that, you know I've gained a few pounds, which is fine.

There was a little bit of hesitancy about staying in Pittsburgh and not moving away for college, but that didn't last long. It was right in line with what I wanted, so I auditioned there and it wasn't a tough decision.

It is true that the top quintile is getting richer while the bottom is getting poorer, but the bottom is not the same people. There is, fortunately, a constant churning at the bottom as new immigrants move in and those who used to be on the bottom begin their long, thrilling upward climb to the American dream.

Never before had she seen such creatures, though they looked much live very large, very shaggy white goats. Thin black horns punctuated the top of their long faces. You look like a collection of grandfathers, she thought, amused.

The music I'm making is like an explosion of love. It moves away from super dark, its more romanticized and floral, but still quite black.

The trick generally is to break programs into pieces and have those pieces be individually testable and so then when you move on to the other pieces you treat it as a black box knowing that it either works or doesn't work.

I feel like my public life isn't necessarily my own. I'm starting to get used to how to maneuver and operate in New York in a way that I don't get stopped all the time. I just pretty much say "Thank you." But one of the things is to try to keep moving. Not to stop too long, because people try to get into a conversation with you all the time. The hardest thing is on the subway, or when people try to chase you down.

The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head--no intricate game of chess where few moves are made in straight-forwardness and ends are attained by indirection, an oblique, tedious, barren game hardly worth that poor candle burnt out in playing it.

I had forgotten that Jess felt about long words the way that racists feel about black people: She hated them, and wanted to send them back from where they came from.

As long as capital-both human and money-can move toward opportunity, trade will not balance.

When black America is on the move, America is on the move.

I would never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the purpose.

I've always expressed myself best through writing. I've gotten out all of my deepest feelings that way for as long as I can remember.