What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing, it's deciding what to write.

If the item of stolen property had been anything other than a book, it would have been confiscated. But a book is different - it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society.

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.

See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places.

The hour of noon has passed,' said Judge Fang. 'Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.

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

And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.