Traditional science is all about finding shortcuts.

The world is colors and motion, feelings and thoughts and what does math have to do with it? Not much, if 'math' means being bored in high school, but in truth mathematics is the one universal science. Mathematics is the study of pure pattern and everything in the cosmos is a kind of pattern.

Selling a book or story has never become absolutely automatic for me.

In any case, A New Kind of Science is a wonderful book, and I'm still absorbing its teachings.

I like a book better if I can't predict what's going to happen.

All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected.

Intellectually, perspective [drawing] is a breakthrough, because here, for the first time, the physical space we live in is being depicted as ifit were an abstract, mathematical space. A less obvious innovation due to perspective is that here, for the first time, people are actually drawing pictures of infinities.