It's usually quite easy to shrug and write something else instead.

Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them "librarians".

Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.

The programmers have another saying: 'The question of whether a machine can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.'

Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface.

More often than not, piracy is a symptom of an under-provisioned market.

Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.

One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one’s god module is overactive at the time.

Unfortunately it's also true to say that good management is a bit like oxygen - it's invisible and you don't notice its presence until it's gone, and then you're sorry.

Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.

Fiction is about human beings, first and foremost. (It's not impossible to write fiction with no human protagonists, but it's very hard to keep the reader interested ...)

I'm watching a dream I'll never wake up from.-Spike Speigel

The novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) in a speech open to all, and to be free in a speech that never concludes.

Happiness is achieved when you stop waiting for your life to begin and start making the most of the moment you are in.

Sin is wrong, not because of what it does to me, or my spouse, or child, or neighbor, but because it is an act of rebellion against the infinitely holy and majestic God.

This was the first of the sorrows of Turin.

What makes the food that we do at Alinea so interesting on the outside is that we really don't let ourselves say no to an idea.

We should never be allowed to forget that it is the customer who, in the end, determines how many people are employed and what sort of wages companies can afford.

We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority.

Vivid simplicity is the articulation, the nature of genius. Wisdom is greater than intelligence; intelligence is greater than philosobabble.

Nobody inspired me more than Julie Andrews, who is a classically trained soprano herself.