The 'information novel' shouldn't be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream.

The loneliness of writing is that you baffle your friends and change the lives of strangers.

Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.

If you're going to immerse yourself in a project for three years, why not stake out a chunk of the world that is completely alien to you and go traveling?

For me, university was just awful because it was closing one door after the other of all these candy shops of professional possibilities.

I used to work for 12 or 14 hours at a time but the digital age has made such happy immersions almost impossible.

My goal for technology has always been to reach a point where the technological mediation becomes invisible.