Richard Powers Quotes
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When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder.
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This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.
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Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you're free. But a few measures more, and the cloak of time closes back around you.
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Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.
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Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it's one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don't even know that we are infected.
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I don't mind arguing with myself. It's when I lose that it bothers me.
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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.
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The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we're disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.
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The Midwest is such a tabula rasa.
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My dream has always been to suspend myself in space when I write, and lying horizontal in bed is the closest to doing that.
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In 25 years of writing novels, I've never had anything that felt like writer's block.
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The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted.
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I used to work for 12 or 14 hours at a time but the digital age has made such happy immersions almost impossible.
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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.
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I keep a quotes journal - of every sentence that I've wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years.
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I like to travel and connect.
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All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.
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Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.
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Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.
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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.
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Everything interests me.
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Type a few lines of code, you create an organism.
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We don't consider the roles that we're taking in making the world the way it is.
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Until I was 42, I could fit everything that I owned into two suitcases.
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I would say the flip side to my fascination with systems is a fascination with components. So many of my books are dialogues between little and big.
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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.
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If you're going to immerse yourself in a project for three years, why not stake out a chunk of the world that is completely alien to you and go traveling?
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What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.
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Out of grad school, I worked as a tech writer for a while before going into computer coding for a living.
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The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything.
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