Ernest Cline Quotes

Time to make the doughnuts.

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.

All I could do was stand there and wait for it to dissipate. "You're evil, you know that?" I said. She grinned and shook her head. "Chaotic Neutral, sugar." I

Going outside is highly overrated.

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

I felt like I'd just been picked last for the world's biggest game of kickball.

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.

We were all probably stuck here for the duration, on the third rock from our sun. Boldly going extinct.

I was too weird, even for the weirdos.

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.

Newer, faster, or more versatile components were always being released, so I was constantly spending large chunks of my meager income on upgrades.

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.

This human understands enough to know when he's being messed with.

What happens when you die? Well, we're not completely sure. But the evidence seems to suggest that nothing happens. You're just dead, your brains stop working, and then you're not around to ask annoying questions anymore. Those stories your heard? About going to a wonderful place called 'heaven' where there is no more pain or death and you live forever in a state of perpetual happiness? Also total bullshit. Just like all that God stuff. There's no evidence of a heaven and there never was. We made that up too. Wishful thinking. So now you have to live the rest of your life knowing you're going to die someday and disappear forever."
"Sorry.

Maybe they seeded life on Earth millions of years ago, and now they're here to punish us for turning out to be such a lame species and inventing reality TV and shit?

If there were other civilizations out there, why would they ever want to make contact with humanity? If this was how we treated each other, how much kindness could we possibly show to some race of bug-eyed beings from beyond?

I was one of the boys who made passes at girls who wore glasses. Any girl who was smarter than me - that was a huge turn-on.

Nebraska," I said. "What's in Nebraska?" "A top-secret Earth Defense Alliance base.

Ernest Cline lives in Austin, Texas, where he devotes a large portion of his time to geeking out. This is his first novel.

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.

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

One person can keep a secret, but not two.

Now whenever I watched a Star Wars film, I found myself wondering how the Empire had the technology to make long-distance holographic phone calls between planets light-years apart, and yet no one had figured out how to make a remote-controlled TIE Fighter or X-Wing yet.

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.

I made a big entrance when I arrived in my flying DeLorean, which I'd obtained by completing a Back to the Future quest on the planet Zemeckis.

Many of the gunters on the front lines took an involuntary step backward. A few others turned and ran for their lives.

Once the people of planet Earth are all hanging out together online in a virtual world without any borders, I think it could change social networking, entertainment and even politics.

You don't need to sell me on anything, Wade," she said. "You're my best friend. My favorite person." With

At a game like this, a gifted human player could always triumph over the game's AI, because software couldn't improvise. It could either react randomly, or in a limited number of predetermined ways, based on a finite number of preprogrammed conditions. This was an axiom in videogames, and would be until humans invented true artificial intelligence.

I stepped inside, closed the door, and locked it behind me. Then I made a silent vow not to go outside again until I had completed my quest. I would abandon the real world altogether until I found the egg.

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.

The OASIS lets you be whoever you want to be. That's why everyone is addicted to it.

So now the polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising,
and the weather is all messed up. Plants and animals are dying off in record
numbers, and lots of people are starving and homeless. And we're still
fighting wars with each other, mostly over the few resources we have left.

Og led us through the mansion's lavish front entrance. The lights were off inside, but instead of turning them on, Morrow took an honest-to-God torch off the wall and used it to illuminate our way.

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

Dagorath was a word in Sindarin, the Elvish language J. R. R. Tolkien had created for The Lord of the Rings.

In the OASIS, you got used to seeing freakishly beautiful faces on everyone. But Art3mis's features didn't look as though they'd been selected from a beauty drop-down menu on some avatar creation template. Her face had the distinctive look of a real person's, as if her true features had been scanned in and mapped onto her avatar. Big hazel eyes, rounded cheekbones, a pointy chin, and a perpetual smirk. I found her unbearably attractive. Art3mis's body was also somewhat unusual. In the OASIS, you usually saw one of two body shapes on female avatars: the absurdly thin yet wildly popular supermodel frame, or the top-heavy, wasp-waisted porn starlet physique (which looked even less natural in the OASIS than it did in the real world). But Art3mis's frame was short and Rubenesque. All curves.

The only thing crazier than hallucinating a fictional videogame spaceship would be to blame it on a frosted breakfast pastry.

Anonymity was one of the major perks of the OASIS.

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.

Land of the Lost, Thundarr the Barbarian, He-Man, Schoolhouse Rock!, G.I. Joe - I knew them all. Because knowing is half the battle.

I was curled up in an old sleeping bag in the corner of the trailer's tiny laundry room, wedged into the gap between the wall and the dryer.

Mr. Morrow, IOI owns this network ... " "Of course they do!" Morrow shouted gleefully. 'The own practically everything! Including you, pretty boy! I mean did they tattoo a UPC code on your ass when they hired you to sit there and spout their corporate propaganda?

In those days, if you wanted to escape to another world, you had to create it yourself, using your brain, some paper, pencils, dice, and a few rule books.

Now I'm in a top-secret government base somewhere in the middle of fucking Iowa, waiting to find out what the hell is happening. In short - I'm totally losing my shit.

For me, growing up as a human being on the planet Earth in the twenty-first century was a real kick in the teeth. Existentially speaking.

You cannot escape your destiny,'

Steven Spielberg making a Ready Player One movie is going to change the course of human history as pertains to how quickly virtual reality is adopted. He's going to shows the whole world the potential of VR, which is one of the reasons I think he's doing it. Once you have to compose for 360 degrees, and a movie is different every time you watch it depending on where you choose to look, it's like the dawn of a new era.

We told each other what movies we were currently watching and what books we were reading.

People who live in glass houses should shut the fuck up.

I never wanted to return to the real world. Because the real world sucked. I

Inside were long rows of blue teleportation booths. Their shape and color always reminded me of Doctor Who's TARDIS.

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

I'd come to see my rig for what it was: an elaborate contraption for deceiving my senses, to allow me to live in a world that didn't exist. Each component of my rig was a bar in the cell where I had willingly imprisoned myself.

Why would real aliens behave exactly like videogame simulations of themselves?

The bastard even refused to watch E.T.! Who doesn't love E.T., I ask you?

The apple had fallen right next to the crazy tree.

I dropped my backpack, shrugged off my coat, and hopped on the exercise bike. Charging the batteries was usually the only physical exercise I got each day.

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.

Humans were still just a bunch of bipedal apes, divided into arbitrary tribes that were constantly at war over their ruined planet's dwindling natural resources.

A lot of kids owned their own interplanetary vehicles. School parking lots all over Ludus were filled with UFOs, TIE fighters, old NASA space shuttles, Vipers from Battlestar Galactica, and other spacecraft designs lifted from every sci-fi movie and TV show you can think of.

A mission where you have to blow up a Death Star while being attacked by two Borg Cubes inside an asteroid field?

No one in the world ever gets what thet want, ans that is beautiful.

You and the other Sux0rz can all go fuck a duck.

I was obsessed. I wouldn't quit. My grades suffered. I didn't care.

She made me laugh. She made me think. She changed the way I saw the world.

You know you've totally screwed up your life when your whole world turns to shit and the only person you have to talk to is your system agent software!

When I tried to access one of the other entertainment libraries, Vintage Movies, the system informed me that I wouldn't be granted access to a wider selection of entertainment options until I had received an above-average rating in three consecutive employee performance reviews. Then the system asked me if I wanted more information on the Indentured Employee Entertainment Reward Program. I didn't.

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

Even humanity's lack of concern for its rampant overpopulation problem now made a terrible kind of sense. What difference did it make if our planet was capable of supporting all seven billion of us in the long term when a far greater threat to our numbers was waiting in the wings? And despite the overwhelming odds, humanity had done what was necessary to ensure its own survival. It filled me with a strange new sense of pride in my own species. We weren't a bunch of primitive monkeys teetering on the brink of self-destruction after all - this appeared ti be an altogether different kind of destruction we were teetering on the brink of.

I spent most of my childhood welded to my Atari 2600, until I got my first computer, a TRS-80.

Says you, assface. It has some great moments." "No," I said, shaking my head. "It doesn't. It's even worse than that first Ewok flick, Caravan of Courage. They shoulda called it Caravan of Suck.

The Firefly universe was anchored in a sector adjacent to the Star Wars galaxy, with a detailed re-creation of the Star Trek universe in the sector adjacent to that.

She grinned. "Don't you want to build a huge interstellar spaceship, load it full of videogames, junk food, and comfy couches, and then get the hell out of here?" "I'm up for that, too," I said. "if it means I get to spend the rest of my life with you.

It suddenly occurred to me just how absurd this scene was: a guy wearing a suit of armor, standing next to an undead king, both hunched over the controls of a classic arcade game.

WarGames had been one of Halliday's all-time favorite movies. Which was why I had watched it over three dozen times.

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.

I'm sort of like Q in the James Bond films. Except, you know, I only get to hand out this one thing.

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.

Few young men know the Oedipal torment of growing up with an insanely hot, perpetually single mom.

This realization allowed me to calm myself enough to heed the whispered advice of Master Yoda now on repeat in my head: Let go of your anger.

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.

I knew Knotcher was trying to push my buttons. Unfortunately, he'd pushed the big red one first.

Arbogast had then assembled a dream team of creative consultants and contractors to help make his bold claim a reality, luring some of the videogame industry's brightest stars away from their own companies and projects, with the sole promise of collaborating on his groundbreaking new MMOs. That was how gaming legends like Chris Roberts, Richard Garriott, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Gabe Newell, and Shigeru Miyamoto had all wound up as consultants on both Terra Firma and Armada - along with several big Hollywood filmmakers, including James Cameron, who had contributed to the EDA's realistic ship and mech designs, and Peter Jackson, whose Weta Workshop had rendered all of the in-game cinematics.

We lived in the Portland Avenue Stacks, a sprawling hive of discolored tin shoeboxes rusting on the shores of I-40, just west of Oklahoma City's decaying skyscraper core.

She used to make me wear earplugs at night so I wouldn't hear her in the next room, talking dirty to tricks in other time zones.

As terrifying and painful as reality can be, it's also the only place where you can find true happiness.

We spread across the entire planet like an unstoppable virus.

Before long, billions of people around the world were working and playing in the OASIS every day. Some of them met, fell in love, and got married without ever setting foot on the same continent. The lines of distinction between a person's real identity and that of their avatar began to blur. It was the dawn of new era, one where most of the human race now spent all of their free time inside a videogame.

But you do realize that nearly half the people on this planet are starving, right?" I detected no malice in her voice. She sounded like she genuinely believed I might not be aware of this fact. "Yes, I know," I said defensively. "The reason so many people are starving is because we've wrecked the planet. The Earth is dying, you know? It's time to leave.

All the intervening layers slipped away, and I lost myself in the game within the game.

You see, ever since the first day of kindergarten, I had been hoping and waiting for some mind-blowingly fantastic, world-altering event to finally shatter the endless monotony of my public education. I had spent hundreds of hours gazing out at the calm, conquered suburban landscape surrounding my school, silently yearning for the outbreak of a zombie apocalypse, a freak accident that would give me super powers, or perhaps the sudden appearance of a band of time-traveling kleptomaniac dwarves. I

Anorak" was a nickname Halliday had been given by a female British exchange student at his high school.

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.

Screw you, Aech! And your dead grandma!

Smooth move, Ex-lax," I heard Art3mis say.

no self-respecting extraterrestrial would ever pick my hometown of Beaverton, Oregon - aka Yawnsville, USA - as their point of first contact.

Mr. S was finally retiring this year, which was a good thing, because he appeared to have run out of shits to give sometime in the previous century.

My father looked as if I'd just gutted him, and I felt a pang of regret - but it was mingled with a twisted sense of satisfaction. It felt good to hurt his feelings - it was payback for the way his choices had irrevocably damaged my own.

Finally, I want to thank all of the writers, filmmakers, actors, artists, musicians, programmers, game designers, and geeks whose work I've paid tribute to in this story. These people have all entertained and enlightened me, and I hope that - like Halliday's hunt - this book will inspire others to seek out their creations.