There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery

In the case of Anathem, most of the research had to do with philosophy and metaphysics. Reading this sort of thing has never been my strong suit, so I actually had to be somewhat more "organized and results-driven" than is my habit. I just made up my mind that I was going to have to read some of these philosophy tomes, and I forced myself to read something like 10 pages a day until I had bashed my way through them.

The story is everything, so it always begins with a story.And research is a kind of scaffolding built underneath the story as I go along. My enjoyment level varies, but in general, I'm writing about topics I find interesting, so I can't gripe too much.

Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about.

That's funny because if anyone actually did prove the existence of God we'd just tell him 'nice proof, Fraa Bly' and start believing in God.