Richard Powers

Out of grad school, I worked as a tech writer for a while before going into computer coding for a living.

We don't consider the roles that we're taking in making the world the way it is.

Until I was 42, I could fit everything that I owned into two suitcases.

I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

I would say the flip side to my fascination with systems is a fascination with components. So many of my books are dialogues between little and big.

I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation.

A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn't considered pathological, we are outside of time.

I used to work for 12 or 14 hours at a time but the digital age has made such happy immersions almost impossible.

The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we're disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.

This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.

What we can do should never by itself determine what we choose to do, yet this is the way technology tends to work.