Rudy Rucker famous quotes

I am, as it were, an eye that the cosmos uses to look at itself. The Mind is not mine alone; the Mind is everywhere.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Eye #Mind #Use

For me, the best thing about Cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just imagine the whole thing is two miles below the moon’s surface, and that half the people’s right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly it’s interesting again.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Moon #Shopping #Two

It's a waste to chase the pipe dream of a magical tiny theory that allows us to make quick and detailed calculations about the future. We can't predict and we can't control. To accept this can be a source of liberation and inner peace. We're part of the unfolding world, surfing the chaotic waves.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Dream #Inner Peace #Surfing

We're part of the unfolding world, surfing the chaotic waves
-- Rudy Rucker

#Surfing #World #Wave

Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Character #Work Out #Rude

A little-known truth: Every aspect of the world is fundamentally unpredictable. Computer scientists have long since proved this.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Long #Littles #World

Some ideas you have to chew on, then roll them around a lot, play with them before you can turn them into funky science fiction.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Play #Ideas #Fiction

What is the shape of space? Is it flat, or is it bent? Is it nicely laid out, or is it warped and shrunken? Is it finite, or is it infinite? Which of the following does space resemble more: (a) a sheet of paper, (b) an endless desert, (c) a soap bubble, (d) a doughnut, (e) an Escher drawing, (f) an ice cream cone, (g) the branches of a tree, or (h) a human body?
-- Rudy Rucker

#Ice Cream #Drawing #Space

Lately Ive been working to convince myself that everything is a computation.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Computation #Convince

Unfortunately our nation, nay, our world, is run by evil morons.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Running #Our World #Evil

In any case, A New Kind of Science is a wonderful book, and I'm still absorbing its teachings.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Teaching #Book #Rude

If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite abundantly clear that there's not going to be a final answer and there won't be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation halt!
-- Rudy Rucker

#Thinking #Finals #Answers

It's soothing to realize that my mind's processes are inherently uncontrollable.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Mind #Realizing #Process

Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Fiction #Principles #Wonder

Selling a book or story has never become absolutely automatic for me.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Book #Stories #Selling

The hard fact is that not everyone does get published.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Doe #Facts

Traditional science is all about finding shortcuts.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Shortcuts #Findings

It's tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that's not particularly good and after about half an hour you know how it's going to end.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Half #Watches #Hours

The world is colors and motion, feelings and thoughts and what does math have to do with it?  Not much, if 'math' means being bored in high school, but in truth mathematics is the one universal science.  Mathematics is the study of pure pattern and everything in the cosmos is a kind of pattern.
-- Rudy Rucker

#School #Mean #Math

When I see an old movie, like from the ’40s or ’50s or ’60s, the people look so calm. They don’t have smartphones, they’re not looking at computer screens, they’re taking their time. They’ll sit in a chair and just stare off into space. I think some day we’ll find our way back to that garden of Eden.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Garden #Thinking #Smartphones

If we suppose that many natural phenomena are in effect computations, the study of computer science can tell us about the kinds of natural phenomena that can occur.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Kind #Computer #Study

The study of infinity is much more than a dry academic game. The intellectual pursuit of the absolute infinity is, as Georg Cantor realized, a form of the soul's quest for God. Whether or not the goal is ever reached, an awareness of the process brings enlightenment.
-- Rudy Rucker

#God #Games #Goal

Intellectually, perspective [drawing] is a breakthrough, because here, for the first time, the physical space we live in is being depicted as ifit were an abstract, mathematical space. A less obvious innovation due to perspective is that here, for the first time, people are actually drawing pictures of infinities.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Math #Drawing #Space

Think of a field of daisies: they bloom, they wither, and in the spring they grow again. Who wants to see the same stupid daisy year after year, especially with a bunch of crappy iron-lung-type equipment bolted to it?
-- Rudy Rucker

#Stupid #Spring #Thinking

The simple process of eating and breathing weave all of us together into a vast four-dimensional array. No matter how isolated you may sometimes feel, no matter how lonely, you are never really cut off from the whole.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Lonely #Cutting #Simple

The churning of a human mind is unpredictable, as is the anatomy of the human heart.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Heart #Mind #Unpredictable

The world is magic. Science is but an insipid style of sorcery.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Style #Magic #World

A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Process #Computation

Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Way #Looks #Certain

At present, however, I don't think the Net is a very good medium for books, books should really be inexpensive lightweight paperbacks you can bang around.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Book #Thinking #Bangs

All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Gnarly #Might #Expected

But how does it feel to plug into a system that's say, a million times as smart as a person.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Smart #Doe #Plugs

Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it's done, keep sending it out for quite awhile.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Writing #Advice #Done

Electronic distribution is more of a fall-back strategy for putting out a book that isn't deemed profitable enough to print. You hardly make any money publishing an electronic book.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Book #Fall #Strategy

I like a book better if I can't predict what's going to happen.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Book

I like to do things that are surprising and different.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Different #Surprising

I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Thinking #Dry #Dead Ends

If all else fails, there's always print or web zines.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Zines #Failing #Print

One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments.
-- Rudy Rucker

#Nice #Rude #Fiction