Richard Powers

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

The 'information novel' shouldn't be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream.

I keep a quotes journal - of every sentence that I've wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years.

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.

I really like science because it seems to be that place where you get the big picture, everything connects.

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

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.

Everything interests me.

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

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.

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.