I would say the flip side to my fascination with systems is a fascination with components. So many of my books are dialogues between little and big.

The web: yet another total disorientation that becomes status quo without anyone realizing it.

Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it's one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don't even know that we are infected.

I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

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?

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

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.