Explore Quotes by Richard Powers

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

The Midwest is such a tabula rasa.

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.

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

For me, university was just awful because it was closing one door after the other of all these candy shops of professional possibilities.

The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we're disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.

Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.

This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.

Evil is the refusal to see one's self in others.

Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.

I really like science because it seems to be that place where you get the big picture, everything connects.

What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.

When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder.

Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.

Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it's one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don't even know that we are infected.