Think of a field of daisies: they bloom, they wither, and in the spring they grow again. Who wants to see the same stupid daisy year after year, especially with a bunch of crappy iron-lung-type equipment bolted to it?

I like to do things that are surprising and different.

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.

Lately I’ve been working to convince myself that everything is a computation.

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.

I am, as it were, an eye that the cosmos uses to look at itself. The Mind is not mine alone; the Mind is everywhere.

When I see an old movie, like from the ’40s or ’50s or ’60s, the people look so calm. They don’t have smartphones, they’re not looking at computer screens, they’re taking their time. They’ll sit in a chair and just stare off into space. I think some day we’ll find our way back to that garden of Eden.