The bureaucrat fell from the sky.

This was the ultimate form of ostentation among technology freaks - to have a system so complete and sophisticated that nothing showed; no machines, no wires, no controls.

The bureaucrat fell from the sky.

I'm going to move to Theory someday. Everything works there.

Writing is a matter of finding the appropriate balance of dinosaurs and sodomy

You see? Characters in books do not read books. Oh, they snap them shut when somebody enters a room, or fling them aside in disgust at what they fancy is said within, or hide their faces in one which they pretend to peruse while somebody else lectures them on matters they'd rather not confront. But they do not read them. 'Twould be recursive, rendering each book effectively infinite, so that no single one might be finished without reading them all. This is the infallible message of discovering on which side of the page you are on.

Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Let me repeat that: Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today! I mean it. Shakespeare was a better stylist, Melville was more important to American letters, and Charles Dickens had a defter hand at creating characters. But among living writers, there is nobody who can even approach Gene Wolfe for brilliance of prose, clarity of thought, and depth in meaning