Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.

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

The simple process of eating and breathing weave all of us together into a vast four-dimensional array. No matter how isolated you may sometimes feel, no matter how lonely, you are never really cut off from the whole.

A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules.

Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.

For me, the best thing about cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just pretend that the whole thing is two miles below the moon’s surface, and that half the people’s right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly it’s interesting again.

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.