Adam Roberts > Quotes

“A realist writer might break his protagonist's leg, or kill his fiancee; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than the screams of the dying.”
― Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia

“I never liked the news; it pretends to be all different, every day, when in fact it is all the same.”
― Adam Roberts, Gradisil

“Do you know where the past and the present intersect?" Jac asked him.
"Where?"
"In your mind, only. It's the only point. Otherwise, the past is further away than the furthest galaxy. We know it, intuitively, because we understand the irrevocability of past action, and sometimes that makes us sad." He looked into Gordius's face, trying to read his expression, but the fellow wouldn't make eye-contact with him. "But it ought not to make us sad. Another name for that irrevocable gap between past and present is -- freedom.”
― Adam Roberts, Jack Glass

“Let us say that science fiction is a kind of conceptual disorientation of the familiar.”
― Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia

“And after night comes day, or more night, depending on the particular time-frame you choose to apply to your perspective.”
― Adam Roberts, By Light Alone

“We used to think God made us in His image, and that meant we were special, until science told us we just evolved that way because it suited a landscape of trees and savannas. That's what science does: it says, look again and you'll see you're not special. But economics? Economics is also a science. And what does it say? ... It says: there is energy, and there are raw materials, and that's the cosmos. But without us the energy is random and the raw material is inert. It's only labour that makes the cosmos come alive. It's only us that make economics happen at all. And that makes us special.”
― Adam Roberts, Jack Glass

“I eventually got a handle on the drinking. It happens as you get older. It happens, or you don’t get older. Drink hard in your twenties and you’re a regular, fun guy. Keep drinking hard through your thirties and you start to separate yourself from fun, health and indeed other people. If you’re still doing it in your forties it’s probably because you have unresolved stresses and problems which you are clumsily and destructively self-medicating. Drinking hard into your fifties means that you’re blowing hot and cold on ever seeing your sixties. I woke up a week after my fiftieth birthday unable to remember the previous three days, and decided to stop. I could say ‘simple as that’, except that it really wasn’t simple at all. There was a clincher, though, and it was this: my main rationale for drinking was to calm myself in the face of my night terrors. But although I drank a lot, the nightmares refused to go away. I tried a few weeks of facing them without the alcohol, and though the terrors were no better they were certainly not worse. So I quit drinking.”
― Adam Roberts, The Thing Itself

“This is what happened. Pay attention.”
― Adam Roberts, Jack Glass

“I have a problem,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov, getting to his feet. ‘I have a problem, that I wish to share with this, our science fiction writers’ collective. We are to concoct a race of aliens against which humanity can unite. Spacefaring aliens, no?’ ‘Yes, of course.’ ‘Then this is my problem. We know the party line. The philosophy of the party has always been that capitalistic Western fantasies of launching rockets to other planets will always be doomed by the internal contradictions of the competitive inefficiency of capitalism itself. Only the combined and unified effort of a whole people would be able to achieve so monumental an achievement as interstellar flight. No capitalist race could ever achieve something as sophisticated as interstellar flight; only communists could do this. Now, how can it be that these evil aliens are able to build spaceships and fly across the void? Surely they are not communists?”
― Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia

“Our habits of thought are stronger than strait-waistcoats. We walk about with habit-coloured spectacles before our eyes, and see everything as we are accustomed to see it.’ He”
― Adam Roberts, The Thing Itself

“and I said it is the nature of love to be infinite and in such an ocean any fear and jealousy is washed away”
― Adam Roberts, The Thing Itself

“ 'A fine story', said Asterinov ....
'Six months in prison, that tale,' said Sergei.
'Was it the witch?', I asked 'I never know where the Party stands on issues of the supernatural...'
.....
'It was, - understand, I do not know for sure, I heard this at second or third hand - it was the walk through the forest. Apparently I was just too convincing in the representation of a poor man's yearning for money...' ”
― Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia

“We do not believe that time is an illusion! Rather, we believe that time only existed for thirty-three years, when God himself fell into the temporal element. Time ended when he ascended to heaven.’ ‘It didn’t exist before?’ ‘No – when Christ was born in Bethlehem, so too was the whole world. His birth was the creation. Of course, the cosmos was created with the traces of its imagined past: fossils were created inside the rocks at that moment; the memories of past time, archaeological records and books – like the Talmud. But none of this actually happened. It was all just an imaginary backstory, embedded within the world when it was created.”
― Adam Roberts, Jack Glass

“I’ve never minded having hangovers. I mean: it’s not that I enjoy them – but there’s something important about them, I think. Something to do with acts and consequences. Something to do with facing down extinction. The truth is we get drunk less for the intoxication and more for the aftermath. Because the experience of intoxication itself, whilst pleasurable (I guess), is fundamentally banal. Whereas the experience of hangover, of post-drunken-excess guilt, has about it something more profound; it carries within its temporary discomfort a mustard seed of existential resonance. It says: I survived, which is to say: I can survive.”
― Adam Roberts

“Not where he eats, but where he is eaten’?” He laughed again. “Racine has his moments, sure, but you can’t beat Shakespeare for the really grisly stuff.”
― Adam Roberts, Twenty Trillion Leagues Under The Sea

“I know you're upset, of course you're upset," said Pu Sto's simulacrum. "You're grieving. Of course you are. I know how much you loved her."

"Love her," Alma corrected, holding up one finger. "A little thing like dying doesn't cast that mighty verb into the past tense, you know.”
― Adam Roberts, By the Pricking of Her Thumb

“He was on the verge of obtaining his heart‘s dream, perhaps; a more alarming prospect than the verge of one‘s own death. For after all death, whatever else it may be when it comes to us, is not going to be a disappointment.”
― Adam Roberts, Swiftly

“Human enjoyment was a fragile skin drawn over a great depth of potential misery”
― Adam Roberts

“Walks all ass straw.’ ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘The car. A classic. Ass-straw translates as star, I believe.”
― Adam Roberts, The Real-Town Murders

“Strands of his soul were escaping out of his mouth”
― Adam Roberts, By Light Alone

“I’ll have to come over,’ she told Zurndorfer. ‘What – in person?’ ‘Yes.’ Zurndorfer’s simface goggled at her. ‘I’m sorry to be dense, but, you mean physically shift yourself from over there to … you know. Here?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, I say, well of course. I mean. If you think that’s necessary. Is that necessary?”
― Adam Roberts, The Real-Town Murders

“Talk is what we have, what makes us distinctive. Talk to us is what webs are to a spider, or speed to a gazelle.’

‘Talk is how we bring what’s inside our minds into the outside world,’ Albie said. ‘Animals have feelings and thoughts. Animals have always had feelings and thoughts – it’s just that only now have they been able to bring them out.”
― Adam Roberts, Bête

“The madness of faith is a very different thing from the madness of Enlightenment Reason.”
― Adam Roberts, Twenty Trillion Leagues Under The Sea

“That’s a question so open-ended it gapes like a goatse,”
― Adam Roberts, Bête

“Marriage is at its best when the love that binds you is simply the idiom in which the two of you move; not something that keeps interrupting your day to day with melodramatic professions of undying love and an endless parade of gifts and boasts and promises.”
― Adam Roberts, Purgatory Mount

“That's a nice sense of immunity from prosecution you got there," Alma told them. "Be a shame if something were to happen to it.”
― Adam Roberts, By the Pricking of Her Thumb

“And now it's afterwards. The worse of it is: it will always be afterwards now.”
― Adam Roberts, By the Pricking of Her Thumb

“The White Cliffs of Dover had been sculpted all along their length into the gigantic visages of famous Brits – another attempt at injecting rebrand vibrancy into the declining real-world economy.”
― Adam Roberts, The Real-Town Murders

“I don’t recall all twelve points of the Great Animal Charter, but I know that the right to vote, to work, the right to welfare benefits and the creation of a set number of specifically animal MPs and MEPs was part of it. It was never going to happen, of course. I don’t suppose the animals believed it would pass; their intention was to provoke dissension amongst humanity.”
― Adam Roberts, Bête

“To say a word once is communicative, to say it twice is emphatic, but to say it twenty times turns it into a trippy floating nothing.”
― Adam Roberts, By Light Alone