Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.

Clearly Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he's about to go down in flames.

If you sincerely believed in God, how could you form one thought, speak one sentence, without mentioning Him?

You don't want your readers seeing easy connections; it becomes a distraction.

Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.

It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.

So a lot of what you see in the Baroque Cycle is me wanting to be one of those guys. In the case of Anathem, I needed something that was more formal, less flashy, as if it had been translated from the classical language of another planet, but enlivened with slang terms that a teenage narrator would enjoy throwing around.