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

Early on, I settled on the first-person strategy as a way to deal with exposition and world-description issues. As long as the book is, it could have been far longer had I gone with an omniscient third-person narrator, or multiple point-of-view characters, since either of those would have enabled me to impart much more detailed information about the history and geography of the world.

Which path do you intend to take, Nell?' said the Constable, sounding very interested. 'Conformity or rebellion?' Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded - they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.

I actually don't think that there is a connection between the survival instinct and a hunger for immortality.

Part of being a sentient human is the ability to anticipate others' mental states - to say "Fred's going to hate this but Jane would love it."

Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight.

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