American - Novelist | June 18, 1957 -
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.
Richard Powers
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Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.
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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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I don't mind arguing with myself. It's when I lose that it bothers me.
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Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.
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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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