Best 36 quotes of Austin Grossman on MyQuotes

Austin Grossman

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    Austin Grossman

    Computers had their origin in military cryptography-in a sense, every computer game represents the commandeering of a military code-breaking apparatus for purposes of human expression.

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    Austin Grossman

    Delicious... Everything I'd hoped for in a new Wild Cards book. The character interactions and plot twists have exactly the complexity, surprise, and unsentimental realism I'd expect out of a George R. R. Martin project.

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    Austin Grossman

    Even if I turned myself in, it wouldn't change anything. It wouldn't make me one of them. I knew that when I got my powers, but really I knew it before then. I learned it as a child on my first day of school, on the warm rainy streets of Bangkok, and in college. If you're different you always know it, and you can't fix it even if you want to. What do you do when you find out your heart is the wrong kind? You take what you're given, and be the hero you can be. Hero to your own cold, inverted heart.

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    Austin Grossman

    I'm really curious about the memory of Nixon for people who grew up under Clinton. What do people remember of him? In his day, the definition of a conservative right-wing president is more like a centrist in our own time. He's also one of our funnier presidents - just a really good character to write about.

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    Austin Grossman

    I'm the smartest man in the world. Once I wore a cape in public, and fought battles against men who could fly, who had metal skin, who could kill you with their eyes. I fought CoreFire to a standstill, and the Super Squadron, and the Champions. Now I have to shuffle through a cafeteria line with men who tried to pass bad checks. Now I have to wonder if there will be chocolate milk in the dispenser. And whether the smartest man in the world has done the smartest thing he could do with his life.

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    Austin Grossman

    Nixon is fascinating because he's our most alienated president. Everybody felt that they never knew who he was - that's palpable in the histories. His face is so cartoony that he's become this cartoon figure. I never really related to the romanticization of J.F.K., and I knew too much about Reagan to idealize him. Nixon falls in between.

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    Austin Grossman

    One day you wake up and realize the world can be conquered... I'm going to put a mask on and scrawl my name across the face of the world, build cities of gold, come back and stomp this place flat, until even the bricks are just dust. So you can just shut up. All of you. I'm going to move the world.

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    Austin Grossman

    There are days when you just don't feel all that evil." You don't become a world-class villain overnight." -Dr. Impossible

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    Austin Grossman

    There's a fine line between a superpower and a chronic medical condition.

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    Austin Grossman

    The video game story-development process is incredibly broken.

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    Austin Grossman

    Video games are a huge, incredibly popular, world-transforming medium.

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    Austin Grossman

    Wearing a cape doesn't do much for your social life.

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    Austin Grossman

    When you get your powers, you learn a lot about yourself. My professors called me mad. It was time for me to stop punishing myself, and start punishing everybody else.

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    Austin Grossman

    When your laboratory explodes, lacing your body with a supercharged elixir, what do you do? You don't just lie there. You crawl out of the rubble, hideously scarred, and swear vengeance on the world. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world.

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    Austin Grossman

    With 'Invincible', I wanted to create my own version of the Marvel or DC universe, with my own heroes and villains.

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    Austin Grossman

    Another teen friendship, another tiny mysterious universe.

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    Austin Grossman

    ... as Eskimo language is to snow, so archaic English is to 'metal objects designed to cause harm'.

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    Austin Grossman

    Chess is a game with simple rules and pieces, a small sixty-four-space board, but there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the universe.

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    Austin Grossman

    Depending on how you looked at it, Darren was our Mick Jagger (designated swaggering extrovert) to Simon's Keith Richards (quietly virtuosic, blatantly self-destructive). Or else Darren had been Paul McCartney (chirpily commercial) and Simon had been John Lennon (moody, introspective, possessed of quasi-mystical insights).

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    Austin Grossman

    He had never been to a party like this and it struck him as a little bizarre, like a feverish nightmare version of school. It was the exact same mass of people, but they had all shown up in the middle of the night, and now there were no teachers and everyone stood in the hallways talking as loudly as possible, and there were no classes except lunch, or else the classes were all different and he hadn't ever studied for any of them.

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    Austin Grossman

    If you haven't been this close to superhumans, you don't understand what it's like to fight them. Even when you've got powers yourself, the predominent impression is one of shock. The forces moving around you are out of human scale, and your nervous system doesn't know how to deal with it. It's like being in a car accident, over and over again. You never feel the pain until later.

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    Austin Grossman

    I'm drawing a diagram of what time looks like if you're looking straight into it - like looking down a tunnel and seeing a circle, if the tunnel were an angry ten-dimensional crab, which is what, in vastly oversimplified terms, we mean by the human word time.

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    Austin Grossman

    It's raining outside. How did you get here? And how did you get to be twenty-eight?

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    Austin Grossman

    It’s time to go and face them. To prepare them, as we say in the trade, a proper reception. Welcome to my island, assholes.

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    Austin Grossman

    It was an unfamiliar feeling, waking up with a place to go, a place I was actually beginning to comprehend and face without a sense of terror. More than that, I was even questioning the assumption that I was, in my bones, a scared and anxious and miserable person. It felt like the days were almost supernaturally good, that I could wake up without the usual wave of terror, that the days were admixed with some foreign substance dripping into them, some animating essence, like the dragonborn races of Endoria, dragonborn days. I felt like I'd stumbled on one of the open secrets of the world. Why hadn't I realized before that being a grown-up could be anything you wanted it to be?

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    Austin Grossman

    It wouldn’t make me one of them. I knew that when I got my powers, but really I knew it before then. I learned it as a child on my first day of school, on the warm rainy streets of Bangkok, and in college. If you’re different you always know it, and you can’t fix it even if you want to. What do you do when you find out your heart is the wrong kind? You take what you’re given, and be the hero you can be. Hero to your own cold, inverted heart.

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    Austin Grossman

    I won but I wasn’t like Pat. Because—and why this should be I’ll never know—I never did a thing that wasn’t somehow touched with selfish, furtive hunger, with a private, annihilating need for recognition. Because I’m like a child in a fairy tale cursed from birth, and there has never been anything I can put my hand to without tainting it, no triumph so great or solemn that it doesn’t turn spoiled and ridiculous. Because, sooner or later, the darkness always gets in.

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    Austin Grossman

    Little Red Riding Hood was a good story, but it wasn't interactive. Sooner or later I wanted to say 'no, I may be Red Riding Hood but I don't care about my grandmother; what I want is heroin and only heroin,' whereas the game had only 'over the river and through the woods' to offer me. Which was a good story, it just might not me mine.

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    Austin Grossman

    None of the questions was what I expected. Most of them were esoteric thought experiments, 'How would you turn Pride and Prejudice into a video game?' and 'If you added a button to Pac-Man, what would you want it to do?' Conundrums like 'How come when Mario jumps he can change direction in midair?

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    Austin Grossman

    One day you wake up and realize the world can be conquered...

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    Austin Grossman

    People talk about Eisenhower's golden age.... It all happened without me. What is the vice presidency? The Constitution dictates only two duties: casting the deciding vote if the Senate is deadlocked and replacing the president if he dies or is impeached. apart from waiting for those two things to happen, you made the rest up and were duly forgotten by history. The exception being Aaron Burr, who shot someone, decisively lowering the bar for the rest of us. What I remember is small pieces of the world: the West Wing, the insides of planes and hotel lobbies and conference rooms. My life was dinners with Pat and the children; airplane flights; placeholder meetings with foreign dignitaries during which I nodded and reminded them I had no power to make and agreement but would speak to the president. Stomach-turning formal breakfasts, speeches to party elders and tradesmen. I opened factories in Detroit and Akron, breathing the various stinks of canneries, slaughterhouses, or rubber plans and bestowing that vice presidential combination of glamour, flattery, and the tacit reminder that they didn't quite rate a visit from the top guy.

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    Austin Grossman

    Save the world? I don't think so. I have my reasons. The world was lost a long time ago, and nothing's going to fix it, maybe not even science.

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    Austin Grossman

    Some days I spent up to three hours in the arcade after school, dimly aware that we were the first people, ever, to be doing these things. We were feeling something they never had - a physical link into the world of the fictional - through the skeletal muscles of the arm to the joystick to the tiny person on the screen, a person in an imagined world. It was crude but real. We'd fashioned an outpost in the hostile, inaccessible world of the imagination, like dangling a bathysphere into the crushing dark of the deep ocean, a realm hitherto inaccessible to humankind. This is what games had become. Computers had their origin in military cryptography - in a sense, every computer game represents the commandeering of a military code-breaking apparatus for purposes of human expression. We'd done that, taken that idea and turned it into a thing its creators never imagined, our own incandescent mythology.

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    Austin Grossman

    The United States of America is logically the least magical place in the world. Planned by committee, not even a country, just a legal umbrella for fifty associated provinces, an elaborate polling system for creating other larger and more permanent committees. No mysteries; no demons; one God at the most. Sure, it had its own folklore and tall tales, but it wasn’t the same. Its rulers weren’t descended from men and women who spoke with birds and rode dragons. Johnny Appleseed and Paul Bunyan were hayseeds, folksy also-rans compared to the madness in the ancient royal blood going back to the Druids, to Byzantium, to Mithraic cults.

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    Austin Grossman

    They could come after me, I guess, but it doesn’t matter- I’m good at escapes. Maybe into the sewers, like the old days. It doesn’t matter. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world.

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    Austin Grossman

    What is it like to be made vice-president? On one level, it's a nearly hallucinatory degree of success. I was barely forty years old, and a shaky, sixty-three-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the entire Western world. It was also like throwing up in convention-hall bathrooms before giving speeches, and after. It was sitting through dinners with men and women with whom I had nothing in common. Spending an enormous amount of time on trains. Promising thins and agreeing to things as advised by people I had barely met, on very little sleep. Huge sums of money were changing hands and everything happening on the grandest scale imaginable while still in most moments remaining pointless and usually outright seedy. I pretended to learn to fly-fish; I watched sporting events. In Maine I was assaulted by a lobster; it seized my lapel in a threatening manner. I tasted local foods and admired factories,farms, department stores, hotels, and (unless I'm misremembering) several empty plots of land.... It was like being given what was almost the nation's highest honor by a man you held in infinite esteem and regarded with perhaps a certain amount of terrified suspicion, a man who disliked you and clearly wanted nothing to do with you, who would scowl and change the subject at the mention of your name. And then being given a very important and very nasty job by that person, and despised for it, almost as much as you despised yourself.