The Midwest is such a tabula rasa.

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.

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

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.

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.

Out of grad school, I worked as a tech writer for a while before going into computer coding for a living.

This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.