Top 40 Rudy Rucker Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The world is colors and motion, feelings and thoughts and what does math have to do with it? Not much, if ‘math’ means being bored in high school, but in truth mathematics is the one universal science. Mathematics is the study of pure pattern and everything in the cosmos is a kind of pattern.”

— Rudy Rucker

2. “The churning of a human mind is unpredictable, as is the anatomy of the human heart.”

— Rudy Rucker

3. “We’re part of the unfolding world, surfing the chaotic waves.”

— Rudy Rucker

4. “Once you’re born, the worst has already happened.”

— Rudy Rucker

5. “Think of a field of daisies: they bloom, they wither, and in the spring they grow again. Who wants to see the same stupid daisy year after year, especially with a bunch of crappy iron-lung-type equipment bolted to it?”

— Rudy Rucker

6. “The study of infinity is much more than a dry academic game. The intellectual pursuit of the absolute infinity is, as Georg Cantor realized, a form of the soul’s quest for God. Whether or not the goal is ever reached, an awareness of the process brings enlightenment.”

— Rudy Rucker

7. “If we suppose that many natural phenomena are in effect computations, the study of computer science can tell us about the kinds of natural phenomena that can occur.”

— Rudy Rucker

8. “All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected.”

— Rudy Rucker

9. “Lately Ive been working to convince myself that everything is a computation.”

— Rudy Rucker

10. “Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.”

— Rudy Rucker

11. “This is like the joke where the guy climbs the mountain and asks the guru, ‘What is the secret of life?,’ and the guru says, ‘All is One,’ and the guys says, ‘Are you kidding?,’ and the guru says, ‘You mean it isn’t?”

— Rudy Rucker

12. “I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end.”

— Rudy Rucker

13. “It’s a waste to chase the pipe dream of a magical tiny theory that allows us to make quick and detailed calculations about the future. We can’t predict and we can’t control. To accept this can be a source of liberation and inner peace. We’re part of the unfolding world, surfing the chaotic waves.”

— Rudy Rucker

14. “I am, as it were, an eye that the cosmos uses to look at itself. The Mind is not mine alone; the Mind is everywhere.”

— Rudy Rucker

15. “It’s tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that’s not particularly good and after about half an hour you know how it’s going to end.”

— Rudy Rucker

16. “If all else fails, there’s always print or web zines.”

— Rudy Rucker

17. “Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way.”

— Rudy Rucker

18. “The world is magic. Science is but an insipid style of sorcery.”

— Rudy Rucker

19. “No one can point to the fourth dimension, yet it is all around us.”

— Rudy Rucker

20. “It’s soothing to realize that my mind’s processes are inherently uncontrollable.”

— Rudy Rucker

21. “As Aquinas, the quintessential theologian, says: “The notion of form is most fully realized in existence itself. And in God existence is not acquired by anything, but God is existence itself subsistent. It is clear, then, that God himself is both limitless and perfect.”28.”

— Rudy Rucker

22. “Long live transfinite mountains, the hollow earth, time machines, fractal writing, aliens, dada, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space, teleportation, artificial reality, robots, pod people, hylozoism, endless shrinking, intelligent goo, antigravity, surrealism, software highs, two-dimensional time, gnarly computation, the art of photo composition, pleasure zappers, nanomachines, mind viruses, hyperspace, monsters from the deep and, of course, always and forever, the attack of the giant ants!”

— Rudy Rucker

23. “Death is simple, but my evasions are complex.”

— Rudy Rucker

24. “If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it’s quite abundantly clear that there’s not going to be a final answer and there won’t be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation halt!”

— Rudy Rucker

25. “I am, as it were, an eye that the cosmos uses to look at itself.”

— Rudy Rucker

26. “A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules.”

— Rudy Rucker

27. “One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments.”

— Rudy Rucker

28. “Unfortunately our nation, nay, our world, is run by evil morons.”

— Rudy Rucker

29. “At present, however, I don’t think the Net is a very good medium for books, books should really be inexpensive lightweight paperbacks you can bang around.”

— Rudy Rucker

30. “I like to do things that are surprising and different.”

— Rudy Rucker

31. “A little-known truth: Every aspect of the world is fundamentally unpredictable. Computer scientists have long since proved this.”

— Rudy Rucker

32. “But how does it feel to plug into a system that’s say, a million times as smart as a person.”

— Rudy Rucker

33. “The simple process of eating and breathing weave all of us together into a vast four-dimensional array. No matter how isolated you may sometimes feel, no matter how lonely, you are never really cut off from the whole.”

— Rudy Rucker

34. “A day, whether six or seven ago, or more than six thousand years ago, is just as near to the present as yesterday. Why? Because all time is contained in the present Now-moment.”

— Rudy Rucker

35. “I like a book better if I can’t predict what’s going to happen.”

— Rudy Rucker

36. “Some ideas you have to chew on, then roll them around a lot, play with them before you can turn them into funky science fiction.”

— Rudy Rucker

37. “The basic idea is simple: All is One. Different religions just find different ways of expressing this universal truth.”

— Rudy Rucker

38. “Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.”

— Rudy Rucker

39. “Traditional science is all about finding shortcuts.”

— Rudy Rucker

40. “Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it’s done, keep sending it out for quite awhile.”

— Rudy Rucker

41. “Our bodies are the time machine.”

— Rudy Rucker

42. “Selling a book or story has never become absolutely automatic for me.”

— Rudy Rucker

43. “I was strange to keep waking up in the morning feeling good.”

— Rudy Rucker

44. “In any case, A New Kind of Science is a wonderful book, and I’m still absorbing its teachings.”

— Rudy Rucker

45. “The hard fact is that not everyone does get published.”

— Rudy Rucker

46. “Electronic distribution is more of a fall-back strategy for putting out a book that isn’t deemed profitable enough to print. You hardly make any money publishing an electronic book.”

— Rudy Rucker