Quotes by Richard Powers

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.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The Midwest is such a tabula rasa.

Richard Powers

The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted.

Richard Powers

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

Richard Powers

My dream has always been to suspend myself in space when I write, and lying horizontal in bed is the closest to doing that.

Richard Powers

All the different ways we know the world all come from the brain, and they all depend on each other to make sense.

Richard Powers

We build our technologies as a way of addressing all our anxieties and desires. They are our passions congealed into these prosthetic extensions of ourselves. And they do it in a way that reflects what we dream ourselves capable of doing.

Richard Powers

Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.

Richard Powers

In 25 years of writing novels, I've never had anything that felt like writer's block.

Richard Powers

Out of grad school, I worked as a tech writer for a while before going into computer coding for a living.

Richard Powers

The 'information novel' shouldn't be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream.

Richard Powers

We don't consider the roles that we're taking in making the world the way it is.

Richard Powers

If you're going to immerse yourself in a project for three years, why not stake out a chunk of the world that is completely alien to you and go traveling?

Richard Powers

Type a few lines of code, you create an organism.

Richard Powers

Until I was 42, I could fit everything that I owned into two suitcases.

Richard Powers

In some ways, art is the most terrifying of human inventions. It preserves the right to undermine all the categories. The history of art is the history of iconoclasm, the history of some new voice saying that everything you know is wrong.

Richard Powers

And then the finale, its four modest notes. Do, re, fa, mi: half a jumbled scale. Too simple to be called invented. But the thing spills out into the world like one of those African antelopes that fall from the womb, still wet with afterbirth but alr...

Richard Powers

Grace was pouring out everywhere, from hidden sounds, into Els's damaged auditory cortex. And all that secret, worldwide composition said the same thing: listen closer, listen smaller, listen lighter, to any noise at all, and hear what the world will...

Richard Powers

What we can do should never by itself determine what we choose to do, yet this is the way technology tends to work.

Richard Powers

My goal for technology has always been to reach a point where the technological mediation becomes invisible.

Richard Powers

I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.

Richard Powers

I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation.

Richard Powers

Author Bio

  • NameRichard Powers
  • Descriptionnovelist
  • BornJune 18, 1957
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionNovelist; Author
  • AwardsMacArthur Fellows Program; National Book Award