What I read: while I'm writing, I tend to go off reading fiction for relaxation - especially the challenging stuff. It's too much like the day job.

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 ...)

Your style guide is your most loyal brand protector.

When I travel, I love speaking to women around the world about the things that inspire them, the fashions they like, what makes something good and what would make it even better.

Our lives are like a candle in the wind.

We can't have a Twitter president. This is serious stuff, this governing.

The temptations of prosperity insinuate themselves after a gentle, but very powerful manner; so that we are but little aware of them and less able to withstand them.

The full potentialities of human fury cannot be reached until a friend of both parties tactfully intervenes.

I like to think about the genre, the essay or the memoir, as much as I enjoy writing within its fluid parameters. And teaching allows me to think about it, to articulate it, and to explore it.

Bosoms are for bedrooms and breastfeeding.

All true wealth is biological.

The dead walk among us.