It has been discovered that C++ provides a remarkable facility for concealing the trival details of a program - such as where its bugs are.
Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.
It's been my habit of mind, over these years, to understand that every situation in which human beings are involved can be turned on its head. Everything someone assures me to be true might not be. Every pillar of belief the world rests on may or may not be about to explode. Most things don't stay the way they are very long. Knowing this, however, has not made me cynical. Cynical means believing that good isn't possible; and I know for a fact that good is. I simply take nothing for granted and try to be ready for the change that's soon to come.
We're all hoping that Trump doesn't get our world on his terms because there won't be anything of it left. Trump is a true psychopath, a psychopath in the way that tragedy becomes tragedy.
Some people think that writers are innately solitary and that there's a kind of romance to that solitariness. I tend to think that what writers really want to do is get accepted into things. They want to get accepted into society, into culture, into intelligentsia, into the fun. Writing is their mechanism, their instrument, for doing that.
Marrying the right girl is even more imperative today than it was when I was 23 years old because it's so much harder to get on as an imaginative writer like me now. You need to have somebody who believes in what you're doing and who never is skeptical about what you're doing. My wife thought it was a great thing for me to be a writer because in practical terms it freed her to do what she wanted to do, which was work.
You can't always go to the well and have things be funny.
Most of suburbia will end up in three ways: ruins, slums, salvage yards for materials.
What happened yesterday is over. What happens today is up to you.
We're still really in catch-up mode in terms of alerting people to the risks of social media, to the kind of consciousness that you need to have when you do publish something. It used to be such a deliberate and elaborate process to get to publication with many steps and phases and editors and you know, now it's instantaneous and it's wonderful, you know, the immediacy and the power of that but it also can be dangerous.
Freedom from obsession is not about something you do; it's about knowing who you are. It's about recognizing what sustains you and what exhausts you. What you love and what you think you love because you believe you can't have it.