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

Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.

I try to find a style that matches the book. In the Baroque Cycle, I got infected with the prose style of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, which is my favorite era. It's recent enough that it is easy to read - easier than Elizabethan English - but it's pre-Victorian and so doesn't have the pomposity that is often a problem with 19th-century English prose. It is earthy and direct and frequently hilarious.

Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.

The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different.

Gold is the corpse of value.

Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code.