Bill McKibben Quotes

One of the joys of a really good book is that you're so into the world of the book, you forget what you're looking at is words on a page.

When I get lost in a book, it's just, like, magical!

What's the fundamental problem that VR solves better than anything? To me it's straightforward. It's story. VR tells stories better than any medium.

As a reader, I want a book to kidnap me into its world. Its world must make my so-called real world seem flimsy. Its world must lure me to return. When I close the book, I should feel bereft.

When I'm in the middle of a book it can go up from there. When you're putting in those hours, the real world kind of fades and the world you're creating becomes almost more real to you than the outside world.

The point of view is the biggest problem with games, because what we play must be clearly presented in the best way for me to have an immersive game experience.

Reading is a heady thing. You can be into the action of someone's thoughts and take a whole trip down someone's ruminations while seconds tick by in the world that they're in, but you can't really do that in film.

At the same time, one of the things I noticed was that the moment there was any kind of audio attached to virtual reality, it really improved the experience, even though the audio didn't feel like a sound engineer or composer had been anywhere near it.

I just love the idea that people disappear into the story for a while. You grab a book, and you want to get back to it, and your life becomes a bit of an interruption. I would love readers to feel like that.

It's the rare book that's able to transport you in a way that a movie does.

When you put on the headset, you want to be tricked; you want your mind to believe you are actually teleported to this new virtual place.

When I was a kid, I liked books that just seemed so dense you could lose yourself in them for a whole afternoon. They were like their own whole world.

I think art, especially literature, has the particular power to immerse the viewer or reader into another world. This is especially powerful in literature, when a reader lives the experience of the characters. So if the characters are human and real enough, then readers will feel empathy for them.

VR should be more emotionally involving, but that doesn't happen automatically by just taking a VR camera and sticking it onto what would be a traditionally blocked scene for 2D.

Virtual reality is already affecting people on an emotional level much more than any other media, and it has the potential to scale: all you need is an attachment for your cellphone, and you can have this experience.

We want to continue to explore new possibilities regarding interface and interaction. We experiment different solutions to make interface an important component for immersion rather than just a remote control.

I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page

I did sit in cinemas as a kid looking at English and American movies thinking, "Wouldn't it be great if the characters were like real people?" And the worst thing is films are constantly advertising themselves, drawing attention to their style of things. But actually I make films that I think are extremely sophisticated and cinematic. But you don't want the audience thinking about the bloody film. You want them to think about what's going on, and believe in it. Be flies on the wall, you know?

To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.

Games are not about being told things. If you want to tell people things, write a book or make a movie. Games are dialogues - and dialogue requires both parties to take the floor once in a while

Thank God for that. You can shut them, say, 'Hold on a moment.' You play God to it. But who has ever torn himself from the claw that encloses you when you drop a seed in a TV parlour? It grows you any shape it wishes! It is an environment as real as the world. It becomes and is the truth. Books can be beaten down with reason. But with all my knowledge and scepticism, I have never been able to argue with a one-hundred-piece symphony orchestra, full colour, three dimensions, and I being in and part of those incredible parlours.

Spoilers are cowardly. They're just people who want to anesthetize themselves against the tension and the experience that the director and the artist have set up. If you go in there knowing what's going to happen, it's like reading the last page of the book. It's just cowardly.

To hold the reader's attention, you have to bring the person who's reading the book inside the experience of the time: What was it like to have been alive then? What were these people like as human beings?

Some books you read. Some books you enjoy. But some books just swallow you up, heart and soul.

When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.