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.

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.

The Midwest is such a tabula rasa.

I don't mind arguing with myself. It's when I lose that it bothers me.

Evil is the refusal to see one's self in others.

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