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.

Type a few lines of code, you create an organism.

We don't consider the roles that we're taking in making the world the way it is.

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.

All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.

I like to travel and connect.

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.