Ernest Cline

“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 don't know if the '80s were unique, but we certainly got original, groundbreaking stuff at the time with movies like 'Back to the Future' and 'Star Wars' - movies that became classics.”

“I was always obsessed with the 'Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai,' this weird little cult movie. There was this promised sequel before the end credits - 'Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League' - and I knew instinctively they were never going to make that movie, because the first one had made, like, $8 at the box office.”

“Personally, I'm kind of swirling in this hurricane of virtual reality because of 'Ready Player One.'”

“I was standing on the shoulders of other science fiction writers like William Gibson, who had written 'Neuromancer' on a typewriter before home computers even really existed, and Neal Stephenson who wrote 'Snow Crash' in the early '90s and imagined an online virtual world before the birth of the modern Internet.”

“'Fanboys' was the first real screenplay that I ever wrote that was an original story with my own characters.”

“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 was afraid, for all of my life, right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it's also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real.”

“VR really changes everything for flight because the old simulators for the PC were 2D, and you couldn't look around inside the cockpit and learn the controls or even track other planes through the cockpit.”

“Gibson wrote 'Neuromancer' on a typewriter, you know, before the technology he was writing about existed.”

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

“I don't even think I was quite a year old. My mother was maybe seven months pregnant with my little brother. I was sucked out of her arms, and she landed 75 yards away from our trailer and had a ruptured disc. The tornado set me down on top of this pile of corrugated lumber and scrap metal.”

“For the whole history of cinema, we've been experiencing movies and television through a two-dimensional, letterboxed window. But once you can start programming entertainment for all the different senses, it becomes a wholly different medium.”

“Growing up in rural Ohio, I knew my way around a double-wide pretty well.”

“I still tell people, 'I'm pretty sure I'm the only 'Star Wars' fan in history to ever break into Skywalker Ranch by writing a movie about breaking into Skywalker Ranch.'”

“I'm surprised that VR has come about so quickly. It's lucky I just happened to write a book imagining virtual reality right on the cusp of it actually happening.”

“I was watching a collection of vintage '80s cereal commercials when I paused to wonder why cereal manufacturers no longer included toy prizes inside every box. It was a tragedy, in my opinion. Another sign that civilization was going straight down the tubes.”

“You're going to turn it into a fascist corporate theme park where the few people who can still afford the price of admission no longer have an ounce of freedom.”

“I've been to Oculus a few times to do book signings and things there, and they tell me 'Ready Player One' is, like, required reading for new employees.”

“What's really astounding to me is a lot of the guys at Oculus VR and other companies who were creating VR tell me that 'Ready Player One' is one of their primary inspirations in getting into virtual reality.”

“In a book, you can describe a scene and have any song you want playing on the radio and have any painting you want hanging on the wall. That was really freeing to me when I was writing 'Ready Player One.' I could throw in everything that I love.”