“If patterns of ones and zeros were ‘like’ patterns of human lives and death, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?”

But with a sigh he had released her hand, while she was so lost in the fantasy that she hadn’t felt it go away, as if he’d known the best moment to let go.

I was dreaming about my grandfather. A very old man, at least as old as I am now, 91. I thought, when I was a boy, that he had been 91 all his life. Now I feel as if I have been 91 all my life.

It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.

Can’t say it often enough — change your hair, change your life.

Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.

Life’s single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.

Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself.

Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.

Information. What’s wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?

To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.

Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.

All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.

Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.

For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross.

What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove’s difference and the universe can be on into a whole ‘nother song.

If the world offered nothing, nowhere to support or make bearable whatever her private grief was, then it is that world, and not she, that is at fault.

I wouldn’t call myself a geek, but I do sometimes teach Mommy and Daddy stuff about computers.

We add to it every now and then. It includes things like never date a guy whose computer costs more than his car (you’ll never get him to pay attention to you except over instant messages)

People think computers will keep them from making mistakes

The future lies in designing and selling computers that people don’t realize are computers at all.

The guy who knows about computers is the last person you want to have creating documentation for people who don’t understand computers.

They’re wrong. With computers you make mistakes faster.

Computers are like horses; they can sense fear and will act based on that.

Comic books aren’t nerdy. You’d have to be an idiot to think computers are nerdy.