“«“I meant, tell me all about this steampunk thing!” Gavin broke in. “How does that concept work out for you people, here in Brazil?”“You don’t know about steampunk?” shouted Xavier, dubiously.“Well, I don’t read many novels! Because I’m kinda fully-booked already! But, obviously, you’re a science fiction writer at a Futurist conference! And I can see that you’re all dressed up like some fancy guy from the past, from the 19th century! So what gives with that? What is all that about?”»”

“I do have two data identities. I have my name, Bruce Sterling, which is my public name under which I write novels. I also have my other name, which is my legal name under which I own property and vote.”

“My idea of an amusement park story is getting adventurers to go tour environmental disaster areas. After all, if the entire Great Barrier Reef gets killed, which seems like an extremely lively possibility, what are you going to do with all that rotting limestone?”

“I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away. What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years away. And what I thought was ten years away... it was already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet.”

“If you don’t have a sense of wonder it’s like you’re dead inside. But your sense of wonder can be used to trick you. You can have a sense of wonder over a thing that’s basically a conjurer’s trick, or a con job, or a rip-off.”

“The future is unwritten. there are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. both of them are great fun to write about if you' re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario. World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children.”

“You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place.”

“But the economy's out of control. Money just doesn't need human beings anymore. Most of us only get in the way.”

“One of the great beauties of politics as an art form was its lack of restriction to merely standard forms of realism.”

“...We'll exchange rings, we'll throw rice. We'll put down roots.'We don't have roots. We're network people. We have aerials.”

“(He) mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute”