“Everything’s bad, until you find something worse.”
Paolo Bacigalupi“I'm particularly interested in black swan events: unprecedented surprises that destroy the conventional wisdom about how the world works.”
Paolo Bacigalupi“I'm not proud of it, but I'm a great liar when I travel. I smile and lie, and things are smooth.”
Paolo Bacigalupi“Science fiction has these obsessions with certain sciences - large scale engineering, neuroscience.”
Paolo Bacigalupi“I was interested in political failure here in the U.S. The way we're failing to work together to solve even our smallest problems, let alone the complex ones.”
Paolo Bacigalupi“At root, I think that any given technology (think nuclear power, gunpowder, the written word...) has the potential to improve our lives, wound it, and also to create unexpected accidents. It's not the technology that's the problem, it's us, the users. However angelic or demonic, or thoughtful or thoughtless we happen to be is then amplified by our technologies.”
Paolo Bacigalupi“Everything’s bad, until you find something worse.”
Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife“They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.”
Paolo Bacigalupi, The Drowned Cities“Start by loving, instead of needing.”
Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife“Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They'd played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They'd pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they'd turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans -- vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They'd had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming.”
Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife“Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.”
Paolo Bacigalupi, The Drowned Cities