Criminal court is where bad people are on their best behavior. It's much more dangerous for lawyers and judges in family court, where good people are at their worst.

The most interesting character to me is someone who is stuck in the no man's land between Belief and Unbelief, Faith and Faithlessness. I'm capitalizing like a German, but it doesn't matter whether it's faith in a person or in God, or belief in science or whatever, it's the desperate in-between state that makes for interesting dramatic tension.

Man is a fire-stealing animal, and we can't help building machines and machine intelligences, even if, from time to time, we use them not only to outsmart ourselves but to bring us right up to the doorstep of Doom.

Making money, it seems, is all about the velocity of moving it around, so that it can exist in Hong Kong one moment and Wall Street a split second later.

I don't think people should be able to swear whenever they want. I just don't want the federal government making laws about swearing. We should trust people's own instincts about what is appropriate in any given situation.

As a society, we pick words that are offensive based on what we're most afraid of. We associate sounds with some dangerous idea, and right now the most dangerous thing to us are the differences between us.

I begin every novel with the vow that I will not write about technology, Catholicism, or Hell. As you know, I end up writing about all three. They just happen to be personal obsessions of mine.