Latest Ron Currie Jr. Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• As an atheist and lapsed Catholic, I feel the absence of faith in my own life quite acutely.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Atheist, Catholic, Absence

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• Most of my writing is an effort, one way or another, to figure something out about myself, and often when I read dialogue between my characters I recognize it as a discussion between two aspects of my own personality, aspects which are too often at odds.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Character, Writing, Odds

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• I know well what faith really means to people in their daily lives, as there are many people in my family whose lives are permeated by their faith: it dictates the way they behave and sustains them in tough times, of which we've had too many lately.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Mean, People, Tough Times

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• I'm definitely excited by big ideas, both in what I write and what I read. Most days, reality is so mind-numbingly dull that I don't understand why someone would write strictly realistic stories, given the almost limitless freedom fiction provides. I don't see the point of making believe if you're not going to actually make believe: hang your ass out in the wind, push at every boundary, make almost unreasonable demands on your reader's willingness to suspend disbelief. This is dangerous, and prone to failure, but that's part of what makes it fun.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Fun, Believe, Writing

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• One of the great things about the Bible, one of the things I think keeps people coming back to it, is that it's nothing if not perpetually topical. You don't have to dig too deeply into today's paper to find slaves and masters, evil authorities.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Thinking, People, Evil

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• I tend toward the pessimistic end of the spectrum, and unfortunately there's little in human history to convince me that pessimism is unwarranted.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Pessimistic, Littles, Pessimism

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• I think that anyone who grew up reading and being taught the Bible, as I did, can't help but have their prose shaped by it later in life. I still have deep, almost primal responses to the language of scripture, and I think that comes through in all my writing.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Reading, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• A lot of the despair we feel watching the news every day flows from our sense of helplessness, and as a fiction writer you get to control things, if only on the page. You get to run the show. You can right wrongs, bring departed loved ones back to life, even take vengeance on God, if that's your thing.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Running, Departed, Despair

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• My sense of humor tends toward both the dark and the absurd - two great tastes that, in my opinion, taste great together.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Dark, Two, Together

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• I don't know if it's something that we as a species are hardwired for or if it's more of a contemporary phenomenon related to technology and rapid dissemination of data. I did know that whatever its cause or nature, I wanted to interrogate this phenomenon. But the only way for me to do that, the only tool I have to dissect it with, is a fictional narrative.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Technology, Data, Tools

  Source: therumpus.net

• If I had a nickel for every time someone told me apologetically "I don't read fiction," I wouldn't have to write fiction anymore. And I share that fascination with the truth. I'm not looking down my nose at it.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Writing, Fascination, Fiction

  Source: therumpus.net

• I haven't written a whole lot of nonfiction, but what I have written leads me to believe that it's an entirely different muscle. The ongoing paradox is that sometimes it's harder to get to the emotional truth of something when you only have the facts at your disposal.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Believe, Emotional, Different

  Source: therumpus.net

• Whenever someone asks me craft questions like that I feel like I can give one of two answers. I can give the academy answer and say that it was very deliberate and I had a plan in mind and I executed that plan exactly to the letter. But this isn't the case.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Two, Giving, Mind

  Source: therumpus.net

• On a micro level, if we're not terribly lucky, this sort of thing can happen to us quite frequently - the political becoming the personal in dramatic and irreparable ways. I remember the first time I went out into the desert, passing by all these mine fields and getting the history on them from my guide and realizing all these murderous mechanisms were real, were just sitting out there waiting for a victim, and some of them had been for sixty, seventy, eighty years.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Real, Years, Passing By

  Source: therumpus.net

• I wonder if kids growing up now are actually going to have that - if they're ever going to be able to unplug and have that ability to concentrate, or if it's just never going to happen for them. It's a little unnerving, frankly.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Growing Up, Kids, Littles

  Source: therumpus.net

• I bailed out on social media for a while, and in short order I found I was able to sit down and read a book again. For the first time in a couple years I could read more than three pages without my brain wandering off into the ether. I drew a direct causal line between all this sort of ratta-tat-tat staccato stimulation that we get from the Internet and my growing inability to sit down and read anything that was longer than 500 words. But for me it came back because those synapses were already latent in my brain.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Couple, Book, Media

  Source: therumpus.net

• We're not cognitively equipped to deal with it. And it's becoming a problem, frankly. It's part of the reason why I quit Facebook. We all hear these things and read reports about how our attention spans are shrinking. It makes me wonder about the generation growing up now, how it will affect their brain development.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Growing Up, Brain, Generations

  Source: therumpus.net

• When you're a child - and my understanding of it is very basic - but when you're a very young child, the stimuli around you prompt your brain to form synapses. Once they're there, they're there, but if they don't form by a certain age, they're not going to.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Children, Understanding, Brain

  Source: therumpus.net

• Oscar Pistorius is now infamous for reasons that I think everybody knows about, but when I hit on his story and put it in the book, what I found fascinating was a description, from one of the scientists who helped Pistorius, of what the Paralympics will become. Because they don't place any restriction on enhancements for athletes, in the very near future the Paralympics will bear a closer resemblance to NASCAR than to the traditional Olympics. There will be a human-machine melding that will result in crazy feats of athleticism.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Crazy, Book, Athlete

  Source: therumpus.net

• I think of this a lot in the terms of books. Of course there's a big to-do culturally about e-books versus print books, sales models. The paradigm has changed but my perspective on it is that there's not going to be another paradigm to alight on because everything will continue to evolve so quickly that our brains won't be able to keep up with it.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Book, Thinking, Perspective

  Source: therumpus.net

• Regardless of whether you believe in the Singularity, you will most likely experience the benefits of it. But we don't really know.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Believe, Benefits, Singularity

  Source: therumpus.net

• Singularity will be an opt-in scenario for human beings, especially as we draw closer to it. The more that we have the opportunity to interface with and combine ourselves with machines and machinery and electronics - those will all be opt-in moments. Would you choose to have some sort of brain implant? Would you choose to have Google Glasses installed in your eyes? It's all an approach; it's all a glide path to the moment of genuine singularity; genuine artificial intelligence.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Eye, Opportunity, Glasses

  Source: therumpus.net

• Some people believe that everyone will experience judgment day. But it's my understanding that the Judgment Day or Rapture that I'm going to experience, as a nonbeliever, is not going to be the good part. That's the essential difference between the Singularity and what we're usually told about the fate of our eternal souls.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Believe, Fate, Differences

  Source: therumpus.net

• Singularity is seen as an event horizon. There's everything that comes before it and everything that comes after it and never the twain shall meet, in much the same way that Judeo-Christian theology presents its notion of the afterlife - there's a very clear and impermeable demarcation there.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Christian, Afterlife, Events

  Source: therumpus.net

• Singularity theory is something that I do believe will come to pass, sooner or later, although whether or not in our lifetime I don't know, and I'm not sitting around waiting for my father to be resurrected. Readers probably have the impression from the book that I'm a lot more a of a techno kook than I actually am. It became a convenient fulcrum in the story, sort of a kaleidoscope through which to address religious and spiritual questions.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Spiritual, Religious, Father

  Source: therumpus.net