About Richard Powers: Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction.
It had to be U. U. was the only town I could still bear, the one spot in the atlas I'd already absorbed head-on. When you take too many of your critical hits in one place, that place can no longer hurt you.
Speech baffled my machine. Helen made all well-formed sentences. But they were hollow and stuffed--linguistic training bras. She sorted nouns from verbs, but, disembodied, she did not know the difference between thing and process, except as they func...
Information may travel at light speed, but meaning spreads at the speed of dark.
I used to work for 12 or 14 hours at a time but the digital age has made such happy immersions almost impossible.
Art is not a mobocracy. It’s a republic.
Chance was just an order that you hadn't yet perceived.
Creation is much in need of ordering.
The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.
The thing about music was that you never knew the shape of anyone’s desire.
Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you’re free.
Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you're free. But a few measures more,...
Sooner or later, all men will do and know all things.
He will love this music to death. In a few more years, he’ll snort at its sentiment and mock its stirring progressions. Once you’ve loved like that, the only safe haven is resentment.
Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.
Reading may be the last secretive behavior that is neither pathological or prosecutable. It is certainly the last refuge from the real-time epidemic. For the stream of a narrative overflows the banks of the real. Story strips its reader, holding her ...
I don't mind arguing with myself. It's when I lose that it bothers me.
For me, university was just awful because it was closing one door after the other of all these candy shops of professional possibilities.
We will live with racism for ever. But senses of self, senses of belonging, senses of us and of others? Those are up for grabs.
I keep a quotes journal - of every sentence that I've wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years.
I would say the flip side to my fascination with systems is a fascination with components. So many of my books are dialogues between little and big.
