Richard Powers Quotes
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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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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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Reading is the last act of secular prayer.
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A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn't considered pathological, we are outside of time.
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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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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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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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I don't mind arguing with myself. It's when I lose that it bothers me.
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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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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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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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Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.
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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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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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For me, university was just awful because it was closing one door after the other of all these candy shops of professional possibilities.
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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.
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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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The 'information novel' shouldn't be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream.
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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.