What we can do should never by itself determine what we choose to do, yet this is the way technology tends to work.

A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn't considered pathological, we are outside of time.

I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.

If you're going to immerse yourself in a project for three years, why not stake out a chunk of the world that is completely alien to you and go traveling?

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.

This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.

We build our technologies as a way of addressing all our anxieties and desires. They are our passions congealed into these prosthetic extensions of ourselves. And they do it in a way that reflects what we dream ourselves capable of doing.

Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we're disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.

All the different ways we know the world all come from the brain, and they all depend on each other to make sense.

Everything interests me.

For me, university was just awful because it was closing one door after the other of all these candy shops of professional possibilities.

I don't mind arguing with myself. It's when I lose that it bothers me.

I keep a quotes journal - of every sentence that I've wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years.

I like to travel and connect.

I really like science because it seems to be that place where you get the big picture, everything connects.

I used to work for 12 or 14 hours at a time but the digital age has made such happy immersions almost impossible.

I would say the flip side to my fascination with systems is a fascination with components. So many of my books are dialogues between little and big.