Top 90 Greg Egan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Mathematics catalogues everything that is not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics is an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders.”

— Greg Egan

2. “Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.”

— Greg Egan

3. “I admire David Lynch so much, and I think he made some bad decisions with Lost Highway.”

— Greg Egan

4. “I said, ‘The truth is whatever you can get away with.’ ‘No, that’s journalism. The truth is whatever you can’t escape.”

— Greg Egan

5. “Let me understand you. Let me piece you together, hold you together. Let me help you to explain yourself.”

— Greg Egan

6. “Fandom is about fandom, it’s a great big social club.”

— Greg Egan

7. “Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century.”

— Greg Egan

8. “You know what they say the modern version of Pascal’s Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God.”

— Greg Egan

9. “I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.”

— Greg Egan

10. “This is what it means to be human: slaughtering the people we might have been. Metaphor or reality, abstract quantum formalism or flesh-and-blood truth, there’s nothing I can do to change it.”

— Greg Egan

11. “Order my life. I’m nothing without you: fragments of time, fragments of words, fragments of feelings. Make sense of me. Make me whole.”

— Greg Egan

12. “No wonder most fleshers had stampeded into the polises, once they had the chance: if disease and aging weren’t reason enough, there was gravity, friction, and inertia. The physical world was one vast, tangled obstacle course of pointless, arbitrary restrictions.”

— Greg Egan

13. “Everyone here would die for the sake of truth. Everyone here lies constantly for the tiniest chance of personal gain. This is what it means to be a scientist.”

— Greg Egan

14. “No, that’s journalism. The truth is whatever you can’t escape.”

— Greg Egan

15. “Is a stranger in a crowd less than human, just because you can’t witness her inner life?”

— Greg Egan

16. “On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed.”

— Greg Egan

17. “Isn’t that what the Peerless is for? Anything too difficult for the home world?”

— Greg Egan

18. “We have a special name, here, for a certain kind of failure to defer to the greater good – for putting a personal sense of doing right above any objective measure of the outcome. It’s called ‘moral vanity’.”

— Greg Egan

19. “If we spend all our time gazing at the wonders ahead without remembering where we’re standing right now, we’re going to trip and fall flat on our face, over and over agaain.”

— Greg Egan

20. “I was matter, like everything else. I could feel the slow decay of my body, the absolute certainty of death. Every heartbeat spelt out a new proof of mortality. Every moment was a premature burial.”

— Greg Egan

21. “Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.”

— Greg Egan

22. “Conquering the Galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.”

— Greg Egan

23. “Would I have been happier? Maybe. But then, happiness was overrated.”

— Greg Egan

24. “Evolution was a random walk across a minefield, not a pre-ordained trajectory, onward and upward toward “perfection.”

— Greg Egan

25. “A computer model which manipulated data about itself and its “surroundings” in essentially the same way as an organic brain would have to possess essentially the same mental states. “Simulated consciousness” was as oxymoronic as “simulated addition.”

— Greg Egan

26. “For there is a truth which cannot be bought or sold, imposed by force, resisted or escaped.”

— Greg Egan

27. “Do you mean, that will be enough to satisfy you – or do you intend making a conscious decision to be satisfied?” She.”

— Greg Egan

28. “Don’t underestimate the need to appeal to people’s imaginations. Maybe you can see all the consequences of your work, already. Other people might need to have them spelled out explicitly.” Maria.”

— Greg Egan

29. “If I’d said that to my sensible, smutty, twelve-year-old self, he would have laughed until he hemorrhaged.”

— Greg Egan

30. “Often when she thought she was reading his body.”

— Greg Egan

31. “Screw every known human culture.”

— Greg Egan

32. “If there was one remaining purpose to my life, though, this was it: to prove that the truth could always be faced – explained, demystified, accepted.”

— Greg Egan

33. “I’ve been taking longer to write stories lately.”

— Greg Egan

34. “He turned back to face them. ‘I do make sense to you, don’t I? I’m not just imagining that communication is taking place?”

— Greg Egan

35. “If Zendegi was a frivolous indulgence, well, it was there alongside every other beautiful, forbidden thing that her contemporaries have risked their lives to regain.”

— Greg Egan

36. “Immortality would have been meaningless, trapped in a “machine” with a finite number of possible states; in a finite time he would have exhausted the list of every possible thing he could be. Only the promise of eternal growth made sense of eternal life.”

— Greg Egan

37. “I’ve supported myself by writing since 1992, and I’m probably very nearly unemployable by now because employers are likely to be put off by the long gap.”

— Greg Egan

38. “Francesca said, “But don’t you see? We talk about God for the simple reason that we still want to. There’s a deeply ingrained human compulsion to keep using that word, that concept – to keep honing it, rather than discarding it – despite the fact that it no longer means what it did five thousand years ago.”

— Greg Egan

39. “It was a rigorous result in information theory that once you could learn in a sufficiently flexible manner – something humanity had achieved in the Bronze Age – the only limits you faced were speed and storage; any other structural changes were just a matter of style.”

— Greg Egan

40. “Simulated consciousness” was as oxymoronic as “simulated addition.”

— Greg Egan

41. “The Universe may be stranger than we can imagine, but it’s going to have a tough time outdoing Egan.”

— Greg Egan

42. “Opponents replied that when you modeled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modeled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed – no real digestion took place. So, when you modeled the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur?”

— Greg Egan

43. “They floated for a while, two flesher-shaped creatures and a giant worm in a cloud of spinning metal fragments, an absurd collection of imaginary debris, glinting by the light of the true stars.”

— Greg Egan

44. “Australian SF book publishing has undergone a boom recently, and sometimes it’s easier for new writers to sell a book to a local publisher first, which then makes a US edition more likely.”

— Greg Egan

45. “When I was ten years old, all I gave my sweetheart was a pair of projections that turned the group of rotations in four dimensions into principal bundles over the three-sphere. Ancient constructions, though I did rediscover them for myself.’ ‘How were they received?’ ‘She liked them so much, she extended them to larger spaces and gave me back the result.”

— Greg Egan

46. “All we can ever know about are the portraits of each other inside our own skulls.”

— Greg Egan

47. “The environment was full of birds and insects, rodents and small reptiles – decorative in appearance, but also satisfying a more abstract aesthetic: softening the harsh radial symmetry of the lone observer; anchoring the simulation by perceiving it from a multitude of view-points. Ontological guy lines.”

— Greg Egan

48. “The Transmuters had built a structure that dwarfed universes, but touched each one only lightly. They hadn’t turned whole worlds to rubble, they hadn’t reshaped galaxies in their image. Having evolved on some distant, finite world, they’d inherited the most valuable survival trait of all. Restraint.”

— Greg Egan

49. “Aden would phone before he left, trying to patch things up, but she could see how easy it would be, now, to break things off permanently. And now that it had reached that stage, it seemed like the obvious thing to do. She wasn’t upset, or relieved – just calm. It always made her feel that way: burning bridges, driving people away. Simplifying her life. She’d.”

— Greg Egan

50. “Had David Hawthorne, by another name, achieved the immortality he’d paid for? Or had he died somewhere along the way? There was no answer. The most that could be said, at any moment, was that someone existed who knew – or believed – that they’d once been David Hawthorne. And so Peer had made the conscious decision to let that be enough.”

— Greg Egan