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" The conclusion I came to was that even if I couldn't sell books, I still liked the process of writing. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

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" As a writer, you should care about reluctant readers. You want these kids to feel like books are amazing and cool and that they're an escape. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I don't know why we choose to reach out to help another person, or why we decide that we can't, and withdraw and try to care only for ourselves, but I'm fascinated by that choice. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I focus a little more on pacing when I write books in the young adult category, and of course there's the great American fear of anything sexual, so that's somewhat backed off in YA. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I think that, when I think about the future that 'The Water Knife' represents, it's one where there's a lack of oversight, planning and organization. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" When somebody keeps telling you, 'This book is amazing,' you sort of have this pleasing instinct to say, 'Oh, let me make you happy again; let me do that trick again.' "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I say I write extrapolations. I look at data points and ask what the world could look like. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" Originally, 'The Windup Girl' started as a short story - a very gnarly, complicated short story set in Bangkok that didn't work very well. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" Economies are embedded inside ecosystems. Companies dependent on tourism, for example, are affected by low rainfall - there's less snow for skiers, and forest fires are more intense. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I used to work for a newspaper that covered local resource issues, and my coworkers and friends were journalists. Their reporting work was always pretty grim. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" As far as 'Windup Girl' becoming a hit - none of us expected that. 'Night Shade' was just hoping not to lose their shirts, and I had grown up hearing from everyone that science fiction didn't sell, so all of our expectations were very low. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I'm interested in how we react when we're heavily pressed. When we're vulnerable and our survival is in question, how do we behave? "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" When we live the 21st-century good life, almost every aspect of it is predicated on not looking at the implications of what we're up to. Happiness at this point has a lot to do with not looking, so you don't feel complicit in some vast and awful enterprise. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" When we talk about dystopias, especially in young adult fiction, a lot of them are essentially science fictional futures. They aren't necessarily tied to the traditional concept of dystopia. And so in that space, my impression is that kids love reading about weird, wild, adventurous places, and dystopia fits that bill. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I'm less crazy and unhappy when I'm writing. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" Novelists want to be published and need a publisher to decide to print 20,000 copies. So you need to entertain on some level. I want to reach out and connect. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" The loneliest Chinese man I ever met lived halfway up the Three Gorges, in Sichuan Province. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I started really thinking a lot about where does a country go when we stop being able to speak to each other, when a nation stops being able to solve problems because its ideological differences become so deep that it just becomes dysfunctional. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" The young adult category is particularly interesting to me in terms of science fiction and fantasy tropes. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" Mostly I sat down and said, 'I'm not going to write a boring story.' And that actually, surprisingly, solves most of your problems. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I have friends who are science journalists, and I'm seeing stories of theirs or talking with them about ideas that they're pitching. Certain kinds of science are around me all the time, like climate change and biology. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I was interested in political failure here in the U.S. The way we're failing to work together to solve even our smallest problems, let alone the complex ones. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" A wise human would have an understanding of the supply chain and how the pieces fit together. But it's against our nature to think about it. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" Teens want to read something that isn't a lie; we adults wish we could put our heads under the blankets and hide from the scary story we're writing for our kids. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" As an author, you're really grateful for the people who are supporting you, but on some other level, that can be a dangerous echo chamber. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I'm really interested in how conflicts arise and how they reach points of no return. I'm no pacifist. Sometimes force is necessary. But war is a choice. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" As a kid, I always liked reading stories where I had a power-projection fantasy. I wanted to be inside of a story where I had power and influence, was going to rise to power, was going to somehow influence my society. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I don't put a very clear label on my work. If anything, I write science fiction - looking at a moment now, in the present, and then extrapolating outward to think about what the future might look like if this particular trend goes on, or if this particular trend is the most dominant. That's a science fictional tool. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" Maybe storytelling belongs in audio - a short story is the length of a commute. That can be a sacred spot where you have the ear of the reader without having to compete with other media like games or TV. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I'm not proud of it, but I'm a great liar when I travel. I smile and lie, and things are smooth. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" The things that have really gotten confusing to me is how you balance the desires of your publishers to produce things on a schedule, and people are always sort of giving you ideas on what you should follow up with or how you should proceed next and things like that. "

Paolo Bacigalupi