Ernest Cline quotes:

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 feel like I was hit by all of geek culture at once while I was growing up in the '70s and '80s. Saturday morning cartoons like 'Star Blazers' and 'Robotech.' Live action Japanese shows like 'Ultraman' and 'The Space Giants.'

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.

Everybody uses pop culture as a shorthand. You might make an obscure reference to Monty Python or Iron Eagle that only some people will get, but if they do it conveys a world of meaning.

I was just starting out, trying to become a screenwriter, and I became the Austin slam champion three times. For a nerdy, kind of a socially awkward guy, that did wonders for my self esteem.

I'm incredibly nostalgic for the '80s, because I think that's when Geek Culture really kicked in to high gear.

It is on!" Aech shouted into his comlink. "it is on like Red Dawn!

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.

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

Going outside is highly overrated.

I have to avoid things like 'World of Warcraft' or 'Minecraft', otherwise I'd never get any work done.

I was 7 years old when the '80s began and 17 years old when they ended, so it was an incredibly formative decade for me.

Being human totally sucks most of the time. Videogames are the only thing that make life bearable.

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.

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 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.

I think it's a bit silly to brand the Internet as the 'downfall of youth.'

I burned through all of my extra lives in a matter of minutes, and my two least-favorite words appeared on the screen: GAME OVER.

Once the people of planet Earth are all hanging out together online in a virtual world without any borders, I think it could change social networking, entertainment and even politics.

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've retroactively made all that wasted time rotting my brain into research. It makes me a hypocrite when I try to tell my own daughter, "I don't know, I think we've played a little too much Mario."

Continue your quest by taking the test. Yes, but what test? What test was I supposed to take? The Kobayashi Maru? The Pepsi Challenge? Could the clue have been any more vague?

I was one of the boys who made passes at girls who wore glasses. Any girl who was smarter than me - that was a huge turn-on.

I never ran out of ammo, because each time I fired a round, a new round was teleported into the bottom of the clip. My bullet bill this month was going to be huge.

Before I became a full-time writer, I worked in tech support in those giant cubicle farms you see. I was surrounded by people who played video games all the time - sometimes actually in the call centers, playing online multiplayer games. I saw friends of mine who began to feel that going online was more compelling to them than real life.

My characters are all kind of geek archetypes of people I've encountered at gaming and comic book conventions.

The clans began to bombard the outer force field with rockets, missiles, nukes, and harsh language.

I felt like a kid standing in the world's greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play.

Very well!" he said"You shall prove your worth by facing me in a joust!" I'd never heard of an undead lich king challenging someone to a joust. Especially not in a subterranean burial chamber"All right," I said uncertainly"But won't we be needing horses for that?" "Not horses," he replied, stepping away from his throne"Birds.

Steven Spielberg making a Ready Player One movie is going to change the course of human history as pertains to how quickly virtual reality is adopted. He's going to shows the whole world the potential of VR, which is one of the reasons I think he's doing it. Once you have to compose for 360 degrees, and a movie is different every time you watch it depending on where you choose to look, it's like the dawn of a new era.

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

I've been invited to speak at about 20 colleges. There's always this moment when I'm having dinner with the college president: 'Ernie, where'd you go to school?'

Very well! he said. You shall prove your worth by facing me in a joust! I'd never heard of an undead lich king challenging someone to a joust. Especially not in a subterranean burial chamber. All right, I said uncertainly. But won't we be needing horses for that? Not horses, he replied, stepping away from his throne. Birds.

Everybody uses pop culture as a shorthand.

I was a painfully shy, awkward kid, with low self-esteem and almost no social skills. Online, I didn't have a problem talking to people or making friends. But in the real world. interacting with other people - especially kids my own age - made me a nervous wreck. I never knew how to act or what to say, and when I did work up the courage to speak, I always seemed to say the wrong thing.

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. There, inside the game's two-dimensional universe, life was simple: It's just you against the machine. Move with your left hand, shoot with your right, and try to stay alive as long as possible.

Video games paid for my house. What am I saying? Go ahead and keep playing!

I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.

Everybody has this fond association with the car from Back to the Future, but most people have never seen one. I've seen people drive off the berm trying to take pictures. It ends up being dangerous.

You're evil, you know that?" said. She grinned and shook her head. "Chaotic Neutral, sugar.

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.

Cops pull me over just to get a better look. They never give me a ticket, even if I'm speeding, but they will ask to take pictures.

Whenever I saw the sun, I reminded myself that I was looking at a star. One of over a hundred billion in our galaxy. A galaxy that was just one of billions of other galaxies in the observable universe. This helped me keep things in perspective.

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.

A river of words flowed between us.

You'd be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever.

As far as my house, I have a ton of video games and three or four old consoles.

I'd designed my avatar's face and body to look, more or less, like my own. My avatar had a slightly smaller nose than me, and he was taller. And thinner. And more muscular. And he didn't have any teenage acne. But aside from these minor details, we looked more or less identical.

I watched a lot of YouTube videos of cute geeky girls playing '80s cover tunes on ukuleles. Technically, this wasn't part of my research, but I had a serious cute-geeky-girls-playing-ukuleles fetish that I can neither explain nor defend.

It's so much better to hand over a finished book than having all these people waiting.

For one quarter, Black Tiger lets me escape from my rotten existence for three glorious hours. Pretty good deal.

One person can keep a secret, but not two.

Lights," I said softly. This had become my favorite word over the past week. In my mind, it had become synonymous with freedom.

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 was obsessed. I wouldn't quit. My grades suffered. I didn't care.

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.

...now that everyone could vote from home, via the OASIS, the only people who could get elected were movie stars, reality TV personalities, or radical televangelists.

You were born at a pretty crappy time in history. And it looks like things are only gonna get worse from here on out.

In the far reaches of the world, under a lost and lonely hill, lies the TOMB OF HORRORS. This labyrinthine crypt is filled with terrible traps, strange and ferocious monsters, rich and magical treasures, and somewhere within rests the evil DemiLich.

I've wanted to own a DeLorean since I was 10 years old, but it always seemed like a silly daydream. Like owning the 'A-Team' van or something.

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

Virtual sex, no matter how realistic, was really nothing but glorified, computer-assisted masturbation.