Top 40 Austin Grossman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It doesn’t matter. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world.”

— Austin Grossman

2. “Computers had their origin in military cryptography-in a sense, every computer game represents the commandeering of a military code-breaking apparatus for purposes of human expression.”

— Austin Grossman

3. “My name is Richard Milhous Nixon. I swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. I was educated at Whittier College in Whittier, California, and I have seen the devil walk.”

— Austin Grossman

4. “Chess is a game with simple rules and pieces, a small sixty-four-space board, but there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the universe.”

— Austin Grossman

5. “When you can’t bear something but it goes on anyway, the person who survives isn’t you anymore; you’ve changed and become someone else, a new person, the one who did bear it after all.”

— Austin Grossman

6. “One day you wake up and realize the world can be conquered... I’m going to put a mask on and scrawl my name across the face of the world, build cities of gold, come back and stomp this place flat, until even the bricks are just dust. So you can just shut up. All of you. I’m going to move the world.”

— Austin Grossman

7. “One day you wake up and realize the world can be conquered.”

— Austin Grossman

8. “Little Red Riding Hood was a good story, but it wasn’t interactive. Sooner or later I wanted to say ‘no, I may be Red Riding Hood but I don’t care about my grandmother; what I want is heroin and only heroin,’ whereas the game had only ‘over the river and through the woods’ to offer me. Which was a good story, it just might not me mine.”

— Austin Grossman

9. “When your laboratory explodes, lacing your body with a supercharged elixir, what do you do? You don’t just lie there. You crawl out of the rubble, hideously scarred, and swear vengeance on the world. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world.”

— Austin Grossman

10. “There’s a fine line between a superpower and a chronic medical condition.”

— Austin Grossman

11. “The video game story-development process is incredibly broken.”

— Austin Grossman

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

12. “Wearing a cape doesn’t do much for your social life.”

— Austin Grossman

13. “This isn’t the first time you’ve done this, or the fifth or the tenth. I guess it’s time to think of it as your life.”

— Austin Grossman

14. “If you haven’t been this close to superhumans, you don’t understand what it’s like to fight them. Even when you’ve got powers yourself, the predominent impression is one of shock. The forces moving around you are out of human scale, and your nervous system doesn’t know how to deal with it. It’s like being in a car accident, over and over again. You never feel the pain until later.”

— Austin Grossman

15. “It’s raining outside. How did you get here? And how did you get to be twenty-eight?”

— Austin Grossman

16. “When you get your powers, you learn a lot about yourself. My professors called me mad. It was time for me to stop punishing myself, and start punishing everybody else.”

— Austin Grossman

17. “Video games are a huge, incredibly popular, world-transforming medium.”

— Austin Grossman

18. “I saw the misadjusted dials and the whirling gauges and the bubbling green fluid and the electricity arcing around, and a story laid out for me, my sorry self alchemically transmuted into power and robots and fortresses and orbital platforms and costumes and alien kings.”

— Austin Grossman

19. “I’m the smartest man in the world. Once I wore a cape in public, and fought battles against men who could fly, who had metal skin, who could kill you with their eyes. I fought CoreFire to a standstill, and the Super Squadron, and the Champions. Now I have to shuffle through a cafeteria line with men who tried to pass bad checks. Now I have to wonder if there will be chocolate milk in the dispenser. And whether the smartest man in the world has done the smartest thing he could do with his life.”

— Austin Grossman

20. “If I had writing materials, I might write a guidebook, a source of advice and inspiration for the next generation of masked criminals, bent prodigies, and lonely geniuses, the ones who’ve been taught to feel different, or the ones who knew it from the start. The ones who are smart enough to do something about it. There are things they should hear. Somebody has to tell them.”

— Austin Grossman

21. “We held certain truths to be self-evident, but those truths were that elves hate orcs and wizards can’t wear metal armor.”

— Austin Grossman

22. “All of it. Lincoln, Taft, what they did. The H-bomb, the RAND Corporation, the king of Persia, the whole long con of it all.”

— Austin Grossman

23. “The heroes pop out at you, impossibly vivid, colorful as playing cards but all from different decks, a jumble of incompatible suits and denominations dealt out for an Alice in Wonderland game.”

— Austin Grossman

24. “The voice came from the other side of the divider, an older man, bald, who wore a leather vest over a dark blue button-down shirt, like a Radio Shack manager who moonlighted as a forest brigand.”

— Austin Grossman

25. “A generation of lawyers and statisticians cut their teeth on the to-hit and damage tables of medieval fantasy. File it under yet another ridiculous thing that probably saved somebody’s life.”

— Austin Grossman

26. “You resolve to reach the center of the galaxy, the center of everything, if you can, and that’s where the game ends, now not a game at all but a campaign that’s going to go on as long as your life does, no matter what you think of me now, because we are graduating from high school, from college, getting married, and now it’s time for all cards to be turned over, all items identified, all secret areas revealed. And now at last maybe we can score this thing properly.”

— Austin Grossman

27. “I would have skipped the following day if I could have. I ddin’t even like Disney World. I was, in fact, slightly afraid of it. When Khrushchev visited Disneyland in 1959, he wasn’t allowed in. It was said that the American authorities couldn’t guarantee his safety inside. And whatever else Khrushchev was, I would have backed him against an infantry division.”

— Austin Grossman

28. “Another teen friendship, another tiny mysterious universe.”

— Austin Grossman

29. “Once you get past a certain threshold, everyone’s problems are the same: fortifying your island and hiding the heat signature from your fusion reactor.”

— Austin Grossman

30. “What does it mean to conquer the world? Is there really a way to do it? Do you have to be the richest one, or the smartest one, or to beat everyone in a fight? Or just know you could? Is it to be invincible? Does it just mean you get the girl you really wanted? Did CoreFire already conquer the world a long time ago? Did I? Or maybe there is no way to do it. No one could have tried harder than I have. Haven’t I already fought a hundred battles, and lost every one? Three.”

— Austin Grossman

31. “Save the world? I don’t think so. I have my reasons. The world was lost a long time ago, and nothing’s going to fix it, maybe not even science.”

— Austin Grossman

32. “I miss the girl I was, and I wish I could tell her that. But she got hurt really bad and I’ve been waiting such a long time for her to be okay again. I bet she never dreamed she would live so long, or do the things she can do now. I wish I could tell her what she’d grow up to be, how strange and beautiful and unexpected she’d be. She’d probably feel a lot better if she knew. The sky and the stars are brilliant, and I think of how much she would have loved this.”

— Austin Grossman

33. “I’m cold and free and the smartest man in the world, and this time they’re going to know it, I promise you. I promise you that.”

— Austin Grossman

34. “The people who hired me have been shot. The people who shot them have been shot.”

— Austin Grossman

35. “You haven’t known terror until you’ve been chased by a man-sized crow.”

— Austin Grossman

36. “He had never been to a party like this and it struck him as a little bizarre, like a feverish nightmare version of school. It was the exact same mass of people, but they had all shown up in the middle of the night, and now there were no teachers and everyone stood in the hallways talking as loudly as possible, and there were no classes except lunch, or else the classes were all different and he hadn’t ever studied for any of them.”

— Austin Grossman

37. “I was thirty-five and I’d thought I was playing political poker and it turned out I’d been playing in some other game I didn’t even know about. Like I’d been holding a hand of kings and then the people around the table started putting down more kings, a king with a squid’s face, a naked king with goat’s horns holding up a bough of holly. A Russian king with an insect’s voice.”

— Austin Grossman

38. “Lisa had an engineer’s way of shrugging off the entire field of the humanities, all three thousand years of it, as self-indulgent fuzzy thinking.”

— Austin Grossman

39. “I won but I wasn’t like Pat. Because – and why this should be I’ll never know – I never did a thing that wasn’t somehow touched with selfish, furtive hunger, with a private, annihilating need for recognition. Because I’m like a child in a fairy tale cursed from birth, and there has never been anything I can put my hand to without tainting it, no triumph so great or solemn that it doesn’t turn spoiled and ridiculous. Because, sooner or later, the darkness always gets in.”

— Austin Grossman

40. “If you’re different you always know it, and you can’t fix it even if you want to. What do you do when you find out your heart is the wrong kind? You take what you’re given, and be the hero you can be. Hero to your own cold, inverted heart.”

— Austin Grossman

41. “I may not be smarter than I was last year, but I know more. And I’m certainly no stupider.”

— Austin Grossman

42. “They could come after me, I guess, but it doesn’t matter- I’m good at escapes. Maybe into the sewers, like the old days. It doesn’t matter. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world.”

— Austin Grossman