Paolo Bacigalupi Quotations

There are parents who are really angry that I decided to portray people who have come into the country illegally as decent human beings.

The young adult category is particularly interesting to me in terms of science fiction and fantasy tropes.

The marketplace tells us that good, visceral storytelling has a place. But there are lots of questions about the format that stories take.

The loneliest Chinese man I ever met lived halfway up the Three Gorges, in Sichuan Province.

The conclusion I came to was that even if I couldn't sell books, I still liked the process of writing.

Science fiction has these obsessions with certain sciences - large scale engineering, neuroscience.

People don't actually stay still, you know - when their area is a disaster, they go somewhere else, right? And that's just a natural human impulse.

Originally, 'The Windup Girl' started as a short story - a very gnarly, complicated short story set in Bangkok that didn't work very well.

Mostly I sat down and said, 'I'm not going to write a boring story.' And that actually, surprisingly, solves most of your problems.

I'm particularly interested in black swan events: unprecedented surprises that destroy the conventional wisdom about how the world works.