Quotes by Max Barry

People resist a census, but give them a profile page and theyll spend all day telling you who they are.

You come to work every day but you hardly get to know anyone. I dont even know the names of half the people I see in the elevators. They say the company is a big family, but I dont know them. And even the people I do, like you two, and Elizabeth, and Roger - do I really? I mean, I like you guys, but we only ever talk about work. When Im out with friends, or at home, I never talk about work. The other day, I tried to explain to my sister why its such a huge deal that Elizabeth ate Rogers donut, and she thought I was insane. And you know what, I agreed with her. At home I couldnt even think why it mattered. Because Im a different person at home. When I leave this place at night, I can feel myself changing. Like shifting gears in my head. And you guys dont know that; you just know what Im like here, which is terrible, because I think Im better away from work. I dont even like who I am here. Is that just me? Or is everyone different when they come to work? If they are, then what are they really like? How can we ever know? All we know are the Work People.

I read once that you need two things to be happy: any two of health, money, and love. You can cover the absense of one with the other two... But now I realized this was unmitigated bullshit, because health and money did not compare with love at all.

She had been in situations like this, where people said, Convince me, and in none of those had they actually wanted to be convinced. She could lay down a perfect argument and they just invented new bullshit on the spot to justify why the answer was still no. When people said, Convince me, she knew it didn’t mean they had an open mind. It meant they had power and wanted to enjoy it a minute.

All empires fall, eventually.” “But why? It’s not for lack of power. In fact, it seems to be the opposite. Their power lulls them into comfort. They become undisciplined. Those who had to earn power are replaced by those who have known nothing else. Who have no comprehension of the need to rise above base desires.[”]

It was always this way: The more people talked, the more they obscured. You didnt need to argue for the truth. You could see it.

Good words were the difference between Emily eating well and not. And what she had found worked best were not facts or arguments but words that tickled people’s brains for some reason, that just amused them. Puns, and exaggerations, and things that were true and not at the same time.

You cant stop me. Your word voodoo, it doesnt work on me. Right? So how do you think youre going to- Eliot produced a pistol. He didnt seem to pull it from anywhere. He just suddenly had it. Wils eyes stung. See? Eliot put away the gun. There are all kinds of persuasion.

Last month we had to sit through a presentation on eliminating redundancy, and it was a bunch of Power Point slides, plus a guy reading out what was on the slides, and then he gave us all hard copies. I don’t understand these things.

There are stories — legends, really — of the “steady job.” Old-timers gather graduates around the flickering light of a computer monitor and tell stories of how the company used to be, back when a job was for life, not just for the business cycle. … The graduates snicker. A steady job! They’ve never heard of such a thing.

She’s such a bitch,” Tina says, which I find a little contradictory, but overall quite true. “She’s got to be in charge of everything.”I sit next to her. “Well, I guess. But in business, that’s leadership.”Tina stares at me for a second. “I can’t believe you consider that a positive trait. How about her inability to accept other points of view? Is it good leadership to be narrow, too?”“Focus,” I say. “They call that focus.”Tina stares at me. “Her paranoia?”“Business savvy.”“Compulsive need to have everything just how she wants it?”“Organizational skills.”“Aggressiveness?”“Aggressiveness,” I say, “is already a good thing.”“Jesus Christ,” Tina says, her eyebrow ring glinting in the morning sun. “Sometimes I worry about this country.

Well, I like to know where Im going before I try to get there. Its a mistake to try to execute a plan before youve thought of one, in my experience.

Within perfect walls there is nothing worth protecting. There is, in fact, nothing. And so we exchange privacy for intimacy.

Theres no requirement that jobs be meaningful. If there was, half the country would be unemployed.

The most fundamental thing about a person is desire. It defines them. Tell me what a person wants, truly wants, and Ill tell you who they are, and how to persuade them.

Your brain doesnt process language quite like other people. Why that is, I have no idea. I have a superior brain? Uh, Eliot said, I wouldnt go that far.

Wil ate without enthusiasm. His bacon tasted like nothing. Like a dead animal, fried. His eggs, aborted chickens.

In my city we spent $1.6 billion on a new ticketing system for the trains. We replaced paper tickets with smartcards and now they can tell where people get on and off. So, question: how is that worth $1.6 billion?People say it’s the government being incompetent, and ok. But this is happening all over. All the transit networks are getting smartcards, the grocery stores are taking your name, the airports are getting face recognition cameras. Those cameras, they don’t work when people try to avoid them. Like, they can be fooled by glasses. We KNOW they’re ineffective as anti-terrorism devices, but we still keep installing them.All of this stuff—the smartcards, the ID systems, the “anti-congestion” car-tracking tech—all of it is terrible at what it’s officially supposed to do. It’s only good for tracking the rest of us, the 99.9% who just use the smartcard or whatever and let ourselves be tracked because it’s easier.I’m not a privacy nut, and I don’t care that much if these organizations want to know where I go and what I buy. But what bothers me is how HARD they’re all working for that data, how much money they’re spending, and how they never admit that’s what they want. It means that information must be really valuable for some reason, and I just wonder to who and why.

I read once that you need two things to be happy. Any two of health, money and love. You can cover the absence of one with the other two. I drew comfort from this idea while I was fully bodied, employed, and unloved. It made me feel I wasnt missing much. But now I realized this was unmitigated bullshit, because health and money did not compare with love at all. I had a girl in a hospital bed who liked me and I didnt know where that might go but I could tell it was more important than low blood pressure. It mattered more than a new car. With Lola in the same building, I walked with a spring in my step. That was true literally. But I mean I was happy, happy on an axis I had previously known about only in theory. I was glad to be alive.

Thanks for being the kind of person who likes to pick up a book. Thats a genuinely great thing. I met a librarian recently who said she doesnt read because books are her job and when she goes home, she just wants to switch off. I think we can agree that thats creepy as hell.