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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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 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.

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.

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.

My dream has always been to suspend myself in space when I write, and lying horizontal in bed is the closest to doing that.

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

Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.

Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.

Out of grad school, I worked as a tech writer for a while before going into computer coding for a living.

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

The Midwest is such a tabula rasa.

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.

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

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.

Until I was 42, I could fit everything that I owned into two suitcases.

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.

We will live with racism for ever. But senses of self, senses of belonging, senses of us and of others? Those are up for grabs.

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.

Wed drifted too far to rely on the old boyhood telepathy anymore.

Information may travel at light speed, but meaning spreads at the speed of dark.

Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.

The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything.

Cancer can take away all of my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart, and it cannot touch my soul.

A man must be strong in that profession, he must have vigor of body and mind, yet I am all out of breath if I walk up a hill; I have not the heart to crush even a fly.

There are those, I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is. It is the American Dream.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

Singularity shows something wrong in the mind.

Remember above all that mental stability comes by examining the contents of the mind, not by avoidence.

I think we will have a boy baby and he will be born on the 20th of August. Everyone else has a girl baby and at times I don't believe I should mind having a little Phyllis Dawn but Dearest wants a boy and I do.

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

But if anyone supposes that there was no commercial fraud in the Middle Ages, let him study the commercial legislation of England for that period, and his mind will be satisfied, if he has a mind to be satisfied and not only a fancy to run away with him.

The mind moves in the direction of our currently dominant thoughts.

I love the male body, it's better designed than the male mind.

Disney had such a hold on the mind of America-they were Adolf Hitler. The whole country thought Disney was some sort of god and that animation was some sort of pure thing for children.

One of the most difficult things to contend with in a hospital is that assumption on the part of the staff that because you have lost your gall bladder you have also lost your mind.

I did know that the book would end with a mind-boggling trial, but I didn't know exactly how it would turn out. I like a little suspense when I am writing, too.

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.

With a firm and steadfast mind one should hold under all conditions, that everywhere the earth is below and the sky above, and to the energetic man, every region is his fatherland.

Periods of wholesome laziness, after days of energetic effort, will wonderfully tone up the mind and body.