My goal for technology has always been to reach a point where the technological mediation becomes invisible..

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

The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body..

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..

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

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 f….

The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted..

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..

When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder..

Reading is the last act of secular prayer..

The Midwest is such a tabula rasa..

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

The web: yet another total disorientation that becomes status quo without anyone realizing it..

I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation..

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 trave….

Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family sa….

The 'information novel' shouldn't be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream..

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….

Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it's one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don't even know that we are infected..

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with tas….

Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the sc….