Words matter. These are the best Richard Powers Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I’d like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I’m doing. That’s one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation.
I really like science because it seems to be that place where you get the big picture, everything connects.
I keep a quotes journal – of every sentence that I’ve wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years.
For me, university was just awful because it was closing one door after the other of all these candy shops of professional possibilities.
Until I was 42, I could fit everything that I owned into two suitcases.
All the different ways we know the world all come from the brain, and they all depend on each other to make sense.
My dream has always been to suspend myself in space when I write, and lying horizontal in bed is the closest to doing that.
In 25 years of writing novels, I’ve never had anything that felt like writer’s block.
We don’t consider the roles that we’re taking in making the world the way it is.
The Midwest is such a tabula rasa.
I like to travel and connect.
The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it’s not corrupted.
What we can do should never by itself determine what we choose to do, yet this is the way technology tends to work.
I used to work for 12 or 14 hours at a time but the digital age has made such happy immersions almost impossible.
The ‘information novel’ shouldn’t be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream.
I don’t mind arguing with myself. It’s when I lose that it bothers me.
Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.
We build our technologies as a way of addressing all our anxieties and desires. They are our passions congealed into these prosthetic extensions of ourselves. And they do it in a way that reflects what we dream ourselves capable of doing.
I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.
Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.
We will live with racism for ever. But senses of self, senses of belonging, senses of us and of others? Those are up for grabs.
Out of grad school, I worked as a tech writer for a while before going into computer coding for a living.
I think that if the novel’s task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life – technology and science.
Type a few lines of code, you create an organism.
Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.
