I'll never be a minimalist. The fact that the prose is more tightly controlled doesn't for a minute mean that it's minimalist. I very much like arcane words and baroque sentence structure.

I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice.

Someone came in all Starfleet badges today. Not on my shift, sadly.' 'Fascist,' Leon had said. 'Why are you so prejudiced against nerds?' 'Please,' Billy said. 'That would be a bit self-hating, wouldn't it?' 'Yeah, but you pass. You're like, you're in deep cover,' Leon said. 'You can sneak out of the nerd ghetto and hide the badge and bring back food and clothes and word of the outside world.

My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.

I always felt sorry for the sidekick as a kid. They never got their due and it left a very bad taste in the mouth - they are defined by a subordinate relationship to someone else. I always felt like a bit of sidekick when I was a kid and it didn't feel fair.

Everything has changed. I cannot be used anymore. Those days are over. I know too much. What I do now, I do for me.

I think there's something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real.