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.

If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.

The less attractive the character, the more I enjoyed writing them. Officious bureaucrats and PowerPoint weasels are where it's at for me.

But I'm not a small-literary-novel kind of guy, and once I'd developed the world in the first couple of hundred pages, I felt that there was potential here to go on and write an engaging story set in that world. So that's what I did. This probably ruins things both for the people who want small literary novels and for those who want action-packed epics, but anyway, it's what I wrote.

I was trying to run something to ground that had come to my attention when I was working on the Baroque Cycle. That series, of course, was about the conflict between Newton and Leibniz. Leibniz developed a system of metaphysics called monadology, which looked pretty weird at the time and was promptly buried by Newtonian-style physics.

Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?" Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?

Give me an adventure. I'm not talking about some massive adventure. Just something that would make getting fired seem small. Something that I might remember when I'm old." "I can't predict the future," I said, "but based on what little I know so far, I'm afraid it has to be a massive adventure or nothing." "Great!" "Probably the kind of adventure that ends in a mass burial.