Ernest Cline

“If I was feeling depressed or frustrated about my lot in life, all I had to do was tap the Player One button, and my worries would instantly slip away as my mind focused itself on the relentless pixelated onslaught on the screen in front of me.”

“I notice when I'm at a party where I don't know anybody - even if I have nothing in common with somebody - we can still talk because we were raised by the same TV and cartoons and movies.”

“I wanted to be able to write in the voice that I talk to my friends and assume that everybody would know what I was talking about.”

“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.”

“Now, a lot of early VR worlds or universes that are coming online take inspiration from 'Ready Player One.' It's just the coolest thing ever.”

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

“I have a thing for evil bald bad guys. The Kurgan is too sexy.”

“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.”

“As we continued to talk, going through the motions of getting to know each other, I 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. None of that had changed, or could be changed by anything as inconsequential as her gender, or skin color, or sexual orientation.”

“In a zombie apocalypse movie, nobody's ever seen a zombie movie. Or in an alien invasion movie, nobody has ever seen an alien invasion movie, like 'Independence Day.'”

“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.”

“You're probably wondering what's going to happen to you. That's easy. The same thing is going to happen to you that has happened to every other human being who has ever lived. You're going to die. We all die. That's just how it is.”

“When you're hanging out with your friends, you reference books and movies, and you don't always know if your friends know what you're referencing. But you throw it out there, and if it connects, it makes people laugh.”

“Everything you could ever want to happen happened to me when 'Ready Player One' came out.”