As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty.

In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality.

My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.

Certainly, for time out of mind, an obsessive dwelling on happier former days has been synonymous with getting older, while it was the juvenescent who rushed with open arms to embrace the future.

Our world is built on biology and once we begin to understand it, it then becomes a technology.

Technology is transforming how we hold ourselves, contorting our bodies into what the New Zealand physiotherapist Steve August calls the 'iHunch.' I've also heard people call it 'text neck,' and in my work, I sometimes refer to it as 'iPosture.'

Yahoo is a battleship. If you've ever seen a battleship, they're gigantic, and Yahoo is gigantic in the terms of consumer Internet companies. To turn a battleship takes a long time, but once you turn that battle ship the right way, it's a battleship, and it can really inflict some damage on an enemy or competition.

People try to treat technology as an object, and it can't be. It can only be a channel.