60 Quotes by Hari Kunzru

People want to get back to the source. The old school. They want things they can touch.

Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio, believed that sound waves never completely die away, that they persist, fainter and fainter, masked by the day-to-day noise of the world. Marconi thought that if he could only invent a microphone powerful enough, he would be able to listen to ancient times.

Electricity is not digital. It does not come in discrete packets, but floods the air and flows through conductors and shoots from the hands of mad scientists in silent movies. If it is futuristic at all, it is a past version of the future, temperamental, unstable, half-alive.

People always look aroused when they’re acting violently.

I wanted to avoid slippage.

Suburbia is all about private ownership and not having to share, and it leads to a paranoid, defensive mindset. I know this, having grown up in Essex.

Say there are three identical-looking pizza joints on a street. Two of those will always be empty. The third will have a line of people patiently waiting, checking their phones. There’s always one place that’s the place. That’s how it works.

I’m interested in complexity, in the mathematical sense, as well as the idiomatic sense. The idea of emergence – that it’s possible for complex patterns to arise out of many simple interactions – is fascinating.

What if the Reasonable Reaction to the World is Endless Horrified Screaming?