The biggest problem is that people have stopped being critical about the role of the computer in their lives. These machines went from being feared as Big Brother surrogates to being thought of as metaphors for liberty and individual freedom.

Has Google appropriated the word 'search?' If so, I find it sad. Search is a deep human yearning, an ancient trope in the recorded history of human life.

I think that focusing all experiences through the lens of the Internet is an example of not being able to see history through the eyes of others, to be so enamored of one's present time that one cannot see that the world was once elsewise and was not about you.

I'm a pessimist. But I think I'd describe my pessimism as broken-hearted optimism.

I'm a dark thoughts writer.

I don't consider myself a Jewish writer.

I really don't like books when characters are just bad or just good.

I feel the best villains are the ones you have feelings for.

I think technical people now should learn literature, because literature teaches you a great deal about how - the depths and variety of human imagination.

I don't like the idea that Facebook controls how people express themselves and changes it periodically according to whatever algorithms they use to figure out what they should do or the whim of some programmer or some CEO. That bothers me a great deal.

There's some intimacy in reading, some thoughtfulness that doesn't exist in machine experiences.

So many people for so many years have promoted technology as the answer to everything. The economy wasn't growing: technology. Poor people: technology. Illness: technology. As if, somehow, technology in and of itself would be a solution. Yet machine values are not always human values.

Writing was a way to get away from my life as a programmer, so I wanted to write about other things, but of course nobody wanted to publish another story about a family, unless it was extraordinary. When I began writing about my life as a programmer, however, people were interested.

I like mysteries.

'I am not adopted; I have mysterious origins.' I have said that sentence many times in the course of my life as an adopted person.

Programmers seem to be changing the world. It would be a relief, for them and for all of us, if they knew something about it.

Technology does not run backward. Once a technical capability is out there, it is out there for good.

Watching a program run is not as revealing as reading its code.

Computer systems could not work without standards - an agreement among programs and systems about how they will exchange information.

Y2K has challenged a belief in digital technology that has been almost religious.

Y2K is showing everyone what technical people have been dealing with for years: the complex, muddled, bug-bitten systems we all depend on, and their nasty tendency toward the occasional disaster.

The act of voting, to put it in computing terms, is a question of user interface.

After we have put our intimate secrets and credit card numbers online, what can prevent us from putting our elections there as well?

Internet voting is surely coming. Though online ballots cannot be made secure, though the problems of voter authentication and privacy will remain unsolvable, I suspect we'll go ahead and do it anyway.