We see everything from the narrator’s point of view, so exposition about the world is limited to what impinges directly on him and the story he’s telling. Considering how old the world is, we learn very little about its history, which I think is a good thing.
The science fiction approach doesn’t mean it’s always about the future; it’s an awareness that this is different.
And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.
Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.
I think that this vein is close to being mined out already, but I’ll say that my knowledge of and talent for linguistics are quite limited and I’m not aware of being a hell of a lot more interested in that topic than I am in others.
Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.
Gold is the corpse of value...
It is commonly the case with technologies that you can get the best insight about how they work by watching them fail.
They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.
Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time.
A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.
Technically, of course, he was right. Socially, he was annoying us.
The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent.
In the room where I work, I have a chalkboard, and as I’m going along, I write the made-up words on it. A few feet from that chalkboard is a copy of the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, to which I refer frequently as a source of ideas and word roots.
Most of the brain’s work is done while the brain’s owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about.
The difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.
Middle class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones.
To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.
Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.
It is the fate of operating systems to become free.