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James Nicoll
75 quotes
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) first seen 1846 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (This observation is extensively quoted even outside of Usenet, and has appeared in textbooks. It has also been misattributed, in part and in whole, to Booker T. Washington, to Ambrose Bierce, to Terry Pratchett, and, i…
“Look, I tried the cat experiment. On the third trial, the cat was dead. On each of the subsequent 413 trials, it remained dead. Am I doing something wrong?”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Romeo and Juliet *died*. I always liked that in a teen romance story.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[F]olks would better off dipping their heads in a bucket of liquid [nitrogen] and battering them against a tree very very hard than reading Baxter's Titan. It would not surprise me if reading that book causes birth defects.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is the sort of book that justifies fatwahs. If WWIII occurred right now, we could die happy knowing Baxter would never write again. If a dinosaur killing asteroid was headed for Earth and I knew Baxter had another book coming up, I would campaign for letting the rock hit, since it is obviously the work of a benevolent deity trying to save us from another Titan.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I can't help but notice that everytime I fly somewhere, other people's planes fall out of the sky.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A lot of my stories end with "And when I regained consciousness, there was a crowd standing around looking at me.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You may have trouble getting permission to aero or lithobrake asteroids on Earth.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Before it exploded one night, I went to a four grade, two room schoolhouse and we had textbooks from the 1940s.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“John Barnes is incredibly variable. Pete's Rule (Never buy a Barnes with sodomy in it) is a good one but unfortunately the publisher does not put that kind of stuff on the cover.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Aha! The Alien Planet Canada series, where the planet the characters are marooned on seems to be Manitoba. Bad bad world building.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have hated every Kress I read, especially this one, but the Bear is a standard Bear and if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After enough concussions the head injuries blur together.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hell, Chuck Yeager could do it in his sleep while on fire, I'm sure.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I find this varies considerably from near-death experience to near-death experience. For example, having a wandering loonie break down the door of my game store to look for women was so funny the entire concussion and pools of blood thing was a minor footnote. Being sucked out into the Atlantic by an undertow was deeply irritating. Having a snowba[n]k collapse on me was alarming because of the claustrophobia issue. The car wreck was over almost before I had time to realise what was happening.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think once you start eating people you should stop claiming to be a vegetarian, even if you only eat bad people.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My grandfather for example only died twice, once during the war and once in the 1980s.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothin'g sa'ys q'uality fantas'y l'ike misuse'd apos'tro'phes.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All gone. Zelazny was one of the first times I looked at something I had had familiarity with to find the spot where the memory should have been empty, replaced by a scrawled "Moved South for the Fishing" sign. Calculus was another loss. It was quite upsetting to reach for a skill and find nothing.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Someday I'd like to read a story about competent people on Mars.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wonder if he's planning a book called SRS? Or F'lu?”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yes, I was surprised how easy it was to cut the door off my cat.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In point of fact, the meteor was something like 30 km when it exploded. It was over north Waterloo and I was north of St Agatha. Two spherical clouds, and two explosions. Unfortunately, I was dealing with a goat that was trying to eat an oil truck's fuel line, goats having this optimistic 'Well, maybe it has become edible since they last time I tried this' worldview, and I missed seeing the explosions.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As I've often said, I'm a fan of hard SF. No, it's more like I am addicted to it, even the stepped-on 20 times and cut with pow[d]ered milk and rat-poison sort of hard SF. This gets us to Stephen Baxter's Mayflower II, published last year in a limited edition from PS Publishing. In one of the great tragedies of publishing, it was not a limited enough edition and so I have read it.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's true that the average human in the Xeelee universe can't eat Jell-O with a straw without accident[al]ly removing an eye but these particular humans start off no stupider than than any other human of their era and proceed to breed themselves into imbecility. Well, farther into imbecility.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We discovered at one point that the brick wall of the pillar would hold up a sock pretty well. This led to sorting socks by putting them on the wall, which in turn led to mosaics built entirely of socks. Mission drift is a hazard in all pursuits, including doing the laundry.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tor is the hard one. They employ a lot of editors, whose tastes vary. They don't always indicate who has edited what (on the choice of the editor, I think) so editor stalking can be more difficult with Tor. Ear-tagging works but is rather surprisingly illegal.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Manitoba... Not sure what to do about them. Restock the province with megafauna and encourage tourism, I think. How quickly can we breed back the saber-toothed cats?”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ben Bova seems to work very hard at working in new discoveries into his Glum Future but alas, his future is glum and not that well written.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't mind hidden depths but I insist that there be a surface.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Livejournal post (2005)
“Until recently baby production was largely dependent on slave labour; as soon as women are allowed to answer the question "Would you like to squeeze as many objects the size of a watermelon out of your body as it takes to kill you?" they generally answer "No, thank you." This leads to falling birthrates everywhere women are not kept enslaved and ignorant of the alternatives.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most of my scars are not fire-related and I no longer say "I know what I am doing" at critical moments.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If there's a stack [of novels to review], the unpromising stuff goes at the top and the promising stuff goes at the bottom. That way, I am eager to finish Overwrought Romantic Mary Sue Fantasy because I know that will let me read Niche Product That Only the Author, James and Some Guy at JPL Likes.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[H]umans hate to admit error even as they stand there, black and smoldering, with the stub of a cigarette in one hand, in the middle of a wide crater containing them and the remains of a sign that once read 'DANGER: VOLATILE EXPLOSIVES'”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It would let me protect the Earth from asteroids. In fact, for a small fee I would protect the Earth on a monthly basis, locating rocks that could be steered into the Earth and then not doing it if the cheque didn't bounce.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Call me an extremist but killing a few hundred million people seems like the sort of method that might have unintended consequences.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Goodkind is noted for subtle allegories the same way Mt Kilimanjaro is known for floating weightlessly.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let's step back and think about the likely outcome of a scenario that involves the words "James Nicoll", "a box of sharp needles" and "possibly without ever having achieved full consciousness" for a moment, shall we?”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[The cat] and I have an agreement: I leave her alone and don't make sudden moves when I wake up to find her perched on my chest, staring with an unblinking hostile gaze at my face and in return she rarely mutilates me.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's bad to wake up and see a large cat in mid-leap from the rough vicinity of the ceiling.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Deadly nightshade is the only plant I have ever been able to get to grow for me.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe that I have now experienced the lifetime maximum exposure to bottom spanking in fantasy novels.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gun-wielding recluse gunned down by local police" isn't the epitaph I want. I am hoping for "Witnesses reported the sound up to two hundred kilometers away" or "Last body part finally located".”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The number of times I have been declared dead is statistically insignificant,although admittedly non-zero.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My father once discovered that one cannot "walk off" gangrene.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Never bring a gun to a fight where the other guy has a time-machine and tomorrow's newspapers.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'s antagonists are always evil moustache-twirlers. She could write a book about a golf open and the main rival to the hero would turn out to have clubs made from compressed kittens.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It takes a courageous Mormon to turn to archaeology to support their argument”
James Nicoll (born 1961) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: LiveJournal post title (2006)
“First rule of space programs in SF: no matter how successful or large they are by our standards, the people in the stories will always bitch about underfunding. This is probably realistic.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of Eyes of Amber and Other Stories by Joan Vinge, 2009
“The thing about the Star Wars expanded universe that most impresses me is how the need for endless sequels has taken what was way back in the late Disco a fairly upbeat series where the good guys eventually prevailed and turned into a crapsack setting that's grimmer than the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Congo Wars I & II and the Mongol Conquests combined.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bujold list message (2011)