If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture.

The future is not Google-able.

You know what your trouble is? You're the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it's going to have some specific purpose. It's for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it's new technology, it'll open areas nobody's ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won't play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of.

You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work.

Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

I have friends who go [Tokyo] frequently on business, and it sounds interesting. I've heard that they have for the first time serious drug problems.