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.

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?

My dream has always been to suspend myself in space when I write, and lying horizontal in bed is the closest to doing that.

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

The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything.

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