Latest Paolo Bacigalupi Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I write at a standing desk, which has helped me be much more productive and solved some back problems, but mostly all my quirky habits have to do with procrastination and avoidance rather than with work. I'm slowly trying to stamp those out.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Writing, Procrastination, Quirky

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

• Maybe because we're photosynthesizing we'll do more work outside. So our laptops will have to get rid of these damn glossy screens that have become so popular. And then we'll sit around outside, sucking up sun, getting fat and green, and surfing the net.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Work Out, Surfing, Green

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

• For pleasure, I'll read military sf, or Elmore Leonard capers, anything that's fast and fun. Otherwise, I mostly pick at books, without any clear focus.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Fun, Military, Book

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

• I used to love reading, but since I've started writing, it's harder for me to immerse, because I spend so much time looking at how the story is structured and trying to see what the author is doing behind the curtain.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Reading, Writing, Trying

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

• I like fast plots with things that explode.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Plot

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

• When I read, I'm either reading to learn, or I'm reading to switch off.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Reading

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

• Plenty of people say my guesses about a future drought in the western U.S. (where I live and grew up) are wrong, so I don't see why I won't be wrong in some people's eyes when I go set a story on foreign shores.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Eye, People, Stories

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

• What I'm hoping to do though is to ground my extrapolations in specificity, and to make sure that the story I tell is deliberately and honestly told.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Stories, Honestly, Specificity

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

• Take three different Thai writers and ask them to extrapolate their county's future, and one hopes that you'll get three very different - but all deeply honest - versions.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Different, Three, Honest

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

• Of course, the more you read, the more you learn, and ultimately there is more information than you can ever use. The difficulty is that as an outsider, you know you're too ignorant for your own good, and so the urge to keep researching and *never* start writing is pretty strong.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Strong, Writing, Ignorant

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

• At some point, you realize you can't provide a perfectly monolithic description of a foreign culture's future any more than you can provide a monolithic description of your own hometown's future. Your choices about what to emphasize and what to leave out make all the difference, and ultimately, your fingerprints and biases and viewpoints are going to be all over the story.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Differences, Choices, Culture

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

• The main reason I want someone to read a story of mine is so they can enjoy it and feel like they got something interesting out of it.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Interesting, Stories, Want

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

• The more you read about and immerse in a culture, the more it comes alive, and the more textured and nuanced and detailed and unstereotypable it becomes.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Culture, Alive

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

• The surfeit of bad trends pushes me to set my stories in worlds which are often diminished versions of our own present.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Stories, World, Trends

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

• The future looks a bit bleak to me.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Looks, Bleak, Bits

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

• Environmental science is telling us a lot about our future and what it could look like, whether we're talking about global warming (the current poster child for the environment) or a loss of genetic diversity in our food supplies, or the effects of low-dose chemicals on human development.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Children, Loss, Talking

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

• Most of the news about the state of the environment is pretty ugly. This is frightening for me personally, but actually motivational for me artistically.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  News, Ugly, Environment

  Source: www.sfsignal.com