Wilkie Collins was a rival and competitor of Dickens. His novel Moonstone sold more copies at the time than Dickens' last two books. But that meant nothing in the long run. Right now, to be honest, Wilkie Collins is what he deserved to be back then: a footnote, an almost lost memory. And he knew he would become that.

Power: a currency that never went out of style.

We are not the only avatars of humanity. Once our computing machines achieved self-consciousness, they became part of this design.

The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.

Books ... were merely nodes in a near-infinite matrix of information that exists in four dimensions, evolving toward the idea of the concept of the approximation of the shadow of Truth vertically through time as well as longitudinally through knowledge.

It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.

Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield.