«“I meant, tell me all about this steampunk thing!” Gavin broke in. “How does that concept work out for you people, here in Brazil?”“You don’t know about steampunk?” shouted Xavier, dubiously.”Well, I don’t read many novels! Because I’m kinda fully-booked already! But, obviously, you’re a science fiction writer at a Futurist conference! And I can see that you’re all dressed up like some fancy guy from the past, from the 19th century! So what gives with that? What is all that about?”»

— Bruce Sterling

In a world so redolent with wonder, how can we allow ourselves to conduct our daily lives with so little insight, such absence of dignity?

— Bruce Sterling

I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away. What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years away. And what I thought was ten years away... it was already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet.

— Bruce Sterling

My idea of an amusement park story is getting adventurers to go tour environmental disaster areas. After all, if the entire Great Barrier Reef gets killed, which seems like an extremely lively possibility, what are you going to do with all that rotting limestone?

— Bruce Sterling

One of the great beauties of politics as an art form was its lack of restriction to merely standard forms of realism.

— Bruce Sterling

Science fiction is not about the freedom of imagination. It's about a free imagination pinched and howling in a vise that other people call real life.

— Bruce Sterling

«She had Google, and she had Wikipedia. She could look up anything obscure, any words or phrases that she didn’t understand. A romance novel was just a book, while the Internet was the Internet. The Internet would crack these nuts for sure.»

— Bruce Sterling

The future is unwritten. There are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. Both of them are great fun to write about if you're a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario. World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children.

— Bruce Sterling

«Trixie wasn’t talking to him, or listening to him. Nothing like that at all. Trixie was off in her own world, flaming away like a blowtorch. She was such an Internet fiend that she had never learned any other way to behave.»

— Bruce Sterling

... We'll exchange rings, we'll throw rice. We'll put down roots.' We don't have roots. Furthermore, we're network people. Furthermore, we have aerials.

— Bruce Sterling