Top 90 Paolo Bacigalupi Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Anderson forces a laugh. “Of course.” He smiles, but inside he is seething. He’ll have to deal with Raleigh. And now perhaps Carlyle as well. He’s been sloppy. He eyes the ngaw with disgust. He’s been waving his latest interest in front of everyone. Grahamites, even, and now this. It’s too easy to get comfortable. To forget all the lines of exposure. And then one day in a bar, someone slaps you in the face.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

52. “When you were alone in the rising ocean, you grabbed whatever raft passed by.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

53. “The man had become more unpredictable as he worked less on the crews and worked more in the shadow world of the beaches, as his drugs whittled him down to a burning core of violence and hungers.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

54. “Knowledge is always two-edged. For every benefit, there is hazard. For every good, evil.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

55. “But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

56. “That’s what the pig in the pen says when his brother gets knifed for dinner.” He shrugged. “You’re still in the pen. Still gonna die.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

57. “They were hunters. But now, as night closed in on them, and the swamp became black and hot and close, they were becoming prey.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

58. “Short fiction seems more targeted – hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it’s a lot smokier and less defined.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

59. “A whole waterlogged world of optimism, torn down by the patient work of changing nature.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

60. “All of them waiting for a reincarnation that they cannot have because none of them deserve the suffering of this particular world.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

61. “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

62. “Men are loyal when you lead from the front. I won’t have a man wasting his time winding a crank fan for me, or waving a palm frond just to keep me comfortable like those heeya in the Trade Ministry. I may lead, but we are all brothers. When you’re a captain, promise me you’ll do the same.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

63. “Suicide is not something I owe you or yours.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

64. “Some things, it was better not to think about. It just made you mad and angry.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

65. “Doctors described Jonah as having poor impulse control, which basically meant that Jonah’s entire world was a series of decisions that balanced precariously on the razor’s edge of clever vs. stupid.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

66. “She is begging for survival, and he speaks of fantasy.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

67. “If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

68. “Half-men don’t fight like people. More like hurricanes.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

69. “I like fast plots with things that explode.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

70. “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

71. “I don’t buy that.” Pearly shook his head. “What have you got without your promises? You’re nothing. Less than nothing.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

72. “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

73. “You call me castoff,” Mahlia said, “Chinese throwaway, whatever.” Amaya was trying to look away, but Mahlia had her pinned, kept her eye to eye. “My old man might have been peacekeeper, but my mom was pure Drowned Cities. You want to war like that, I’m all in.” Mahlia lifted the scarred stump of her right hand, shoved it up in Amaya’s face. “Maybe I cut you the way the Army of God cut me. See how you do with just a lucky left. How’d you like that?”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

74. “Doctor Mahfouz used to say living in the Drowned Cities made people crazy. Like it came in with the tide. When the water came up, so did the killing.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

75. “Everything’s bad, until you find something worse.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

76. “All is transient. Even bo trees cannot last.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

77. “You should remember that, all of you. If you’re just smart or just lucky, it’s not worth a copper yard. You got to have both, or you’re just like Sloth down at those bonfires, begging for someone to find a use for you.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

78. “They say in the military that a good battle plan can last as long as five minutes in real fighting. After that, it comes down to if the general is favored by fate and the spirits.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

79. “He was going to drown, but hey, he could read.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

80. “There’s a certain trick to ignoring her bad moods. The first time Jaidee met Kanya, he almost thought she was stupid, the way her face remained so impassive, so impervious to any hint of fun, as though she were missing an organ, a nose for smell, eyes for sight, and whatever curious organ makes a person sense sanuk when it is right in front of them.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

81. “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

82. “The problem with keeping money in a bank is that in the blink of a tiger’s eye it will turn on you: what’s yours becomes theirs, what was your sweat and labour and sold off portions of a lifetime becomes a stranger’s.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

83. “A gamble. Everything was a damn gamble. Betting against luck and the Fates, again and again, and again. She kept walking, waiting for the bullet.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

84. “Nature has become something new. It is ours now, truly. And if our creation devours us, how poetic will that be?”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

85. “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

86. “Mahlia just waited. She was good at that. When you were a castoff, it didn’t do any good trying to talk to people, but sometimes, if you just kind of waited them out, people would get uncomfortable and feel like they had to do something.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

87. “Language is how we hack other people’s brains. It’s how we make them see things the way we want them to see them.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

88. “A sudden eruption, and the surprise of realizing that the world he understands is not the one he actually inhabits.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

89. “How did you find truth when everyone was talking about sides?”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

90. “Whenever I think I’m cynical, I find out I’m nowhere near cynical enough.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

91. “We’re so few in comparison to the past, where did all the souls go?”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

92. “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

93. “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

94. “Jaidee always insisted that the Kingdom was a happy country, that old story about the Land of Smiles. But Kanya cannot think of a time when she has seen smiles as wide as those in museum photos from before the Contraction. She sometimes wonders if those people in the photos were acting, if perhaps the National Gallery is intended to depress her, or if it is really true that at one point people smiled so totally, so fearlessly.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

95. “Knowing all and having the necessary tools are two different things. This is hardly a hospital. We make do with what we have, and none of that is Mahlia’s fault. Tani is the victim of many evils, but Mahlia is not the beginning of that chain, nor the end. I am responsible, if anyone is.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

96. “Certainly I’m qualified to crash a dirigible.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

97. “It’s the first rule of bureaucracy: any message worth sending is worth sending in triplicate.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

98. “Despite everything, he failed to understand the capriciousness of warfare. In his arrogance he thought he could prepare. Such a fool...”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

99. “I thought everybody was moneygrubbing. Rich people just do it better.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi