Ernest Cline Quotes

Everybody has this fond association with the car from Back to the Future, but most people have never seen one. I've seen people drive off the berm trying to take pictures. It ends up being dangerous.

I think it's a bit silly to brand the Internet as the 'downfall of youth.'

I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.

I was 7 years old when the '80s began and 17 years old when they ended, so it was an incredibly formative decade for me.

Being human totally sucks most of the time. Videogames are the only thing that make life bearable.

I feel like I was hit by all of geek culture at once while I was growing up in the '70s and '80s. Saturday morning cartoons like 'Star Blazers' and 'Robotech.' Live action Japanese shows like 'Ultraman' and 'The Space Giants.'

Continue your quest by taking the test. Yes, but what test? What test was I supposed to take? The Kobayashi Maru? The Pepsi Challenge? Could the clue have been any more vague?

The clans began to bombard the outer force field with rockets, missiles, nukes, and harsh language.

A river of words flowed between us.

In the far reaches of the world, under a lost and lonely hill, lies the TOMB OF HORRORS. This labyrinthine crypt is filled with terrible traps, strange and ferocious monsters, rich and magical treasures, and somewhere within rests the evil DemiLich.

I never ran out of ammo, because each time I fired a round, a new round was teleported into the bottom of the clip. My bullet bill this month was going to be huge.

Virtual sex, no matter how realistic, was really nothing but glorified, computer-assisted masturbation.

You'd be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever.

Going outside is highly overrated.

As we continued to talk, going through the motions of getting to know each other, I realized that we already did know each other, as well as any two people could. We’d known each other for years, in the most intimate way possible. We’d connected on a purely mental level. I understood her, trusted her, and loved her as a dear friend. None of that had changed, or could be changed by anything as inconsequential as her gender, or skin color, or sexual orientation.

I felt like a kid standing in the world's greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play.

I have to avoid things like 'World of Warcraft' or 'Minecraft', otherwise I'd never get any work done.

I wanted to be able to write in the voice that I talk to my friends and assume that everybody would know what I was talking about.

No one in the world gets what they want and that is beautiful.

You were born at a pretty crappy time in history. And it looks like things are only gonna get worse from here on out.

For one quarter, Black Tiger lets me escape from my rotten existence for three glorious hours. Pretty good deal.

"Lights," I said softly. This had become my favorite word over the past week. In my mind, it had become synonymous with freedom.

Cops pull me over just to get a better look. They never give me a ticket, even if I'm speeding, but they will ask to take pictures.

I'm incredibly nostalgic for the '80s, because I think that's when Geek Culture really kicked in to high gear.

I noticed in the late 1990s that my friends and I were already nostalgic for the 1980s, and by the turn of the century, VH1's 'I Love the '80s' gave all of us an accelerated nostalgia for our generation.

You're probably wondering what's going to happen to you. That's easy. The same thing is going to happen to you that has happened to every other human being who has ever lived. You're going to die. We all die. That's just how it is.

I was just starting out, trying to become a screenwriter, and I became the Austin slam champion three times. For a nerdy, kind of a socially awkward guy, that did wonders for my self esteem.

My characters are all kind of geek archetypes of people I've encountered at gaming and comic book conventions.

...now that everyone could vote from home, via the OASIS, the only people who could get elected were movie stars, reality TV personalities, or radical televangelists.

Video games paid for my house. What am I saying? Go ahead and keep playing!

I've been invited to speak at about 20 colleges. There's always this moment when I'm having dinner with the college president: 'Ernie, where'd you go to school?'

I've wanted to own a DeLorean since I was 10 years old, but it always seemed like a silly daydream. Like owning the "A-Team" van or something.

Very well! he said. You shall prove your worth by facing me in a joust! I'd never heard of an undead lich king challenging someone to a joust. Especially not in a subterranean burial chamber. All right, I said uncertainly. But won't we be needing horses for that? Not horses, he replied, stepping away from his throne. Birds.

I've never really collected anything other than old Atari cartridges. I only had, like, 12 Atari games as a kid, so at some point in my 20s I decided I was going to own all of them.

It is on!" Aech shouted into his comlink. "it is on like Red Dawn!

I’d designed my avatar’s face and body to look, more or less, like my own. My avatar had a slightly smaller nose than me, and he was taller. And thinner. And more muscular. And he didn’t have any teenage acne. But aside from these minor details, we looked more or less identical.

I have a thing for evil bald bad guys. The Kurgan is too sexy.

My favorite video game of all time is called 'Black Tiger'. It's a Capcom Dungeons and Dragons game from 1987. I have the actual arcade version sitting in my office.

It's so much better to hand over a finished book than having all these people waiting.

If I was feeling depressed or frustrated about my lot in life, all I had to do was tap the Player One button, and my worries would instantly slip away as my mind focused itself on the relentless pixelated onslaught on the screen in front of me. There, inside the game's two-dimensional universe, life was simple: It's just you against the machine. Move with your left hand, shoot with your right, and try to stay alive as long as possible.

I've retroactively made all that wasted time rotting my brain into research. It makes me a hypocrite when I try to tell my own daughter, "I don't know, I think we've played a little too much Mario."

I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn't know how to connect with the people there.

I burned through all of my extra lives in a matter of minutes, and my two least-favorite words appeared on the screen: GAME OVER.

As far as my house, I have a ton of video games and three or four old consoles.

I was a painfully shy, awkward kid, with low self-esteem and almost no social skills. Online, I didn't have a problem talking to people or making friends. But in the real world. interacting with other people - especially kids my own age - made me a nervous wreck. I never knew how to act or what to say, and when I did work up the courage to speak, I always seemed to say the wrong thing.

I watched a lot of YouTube videos of cute geeky girls playing '80s cover tunes on ukuleles. Technically, this wasn't part of my research, but I had a serious cute-geeky-girls-playing-ukuleles fetish that I can neither explain nor defend.

You’re evil, you know that?” I said. She grinned and shook her head. “Chaotic Neutral, sugar.

Everybody uses pop culture as a shorthand.