I assume that - because you can get degrees in journalism from very reputable universities - I assume that people can be trained to be journalists. I've never been entirely certain that anyone can be trained to be a novelist in the same way.

It doesn't matter how fast your modem is if you're being shelled by ethnic separatists.

That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.

He'd been numb a long time, years. All his nights down Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug deal. But now he'd found this warm thing, this chip of murder. Meat, some part of him said. It's the meat talking, ignore it.

Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.

The 'Net is a waste of time.

I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign.