Every English-speaking geek with a weblog has already linked to this, so this is just my me too.
Stephenson is a smart and funny dude, as evidenced in his interview at Slashdot. He can take a question, put it on the treadmill of his intellectual curiosity, and run with it. Or, something like that. He and I seem to have been reading some of the same stuff lately. I’ve read five of the books he mentions, all of which were very enjoyable. I’ll have to check out the other titles he mentions.
Anyway, here are a few choice quips from his interview.
I had to let her know that the reason she’d never heard of me was because I was famous.
It’s not clear why they think I’m any more arrogant than anyone else who writes a book and actually expects that someone’s going to read it.
If I’m going to eat at a restaurant, I don’t care about the chef’s personality flaws—I just want to eat good food.
Literary critics know perfectly well that nothing they say is likely to have much effect on sales.
While hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit (I am paraphrasing his argument). And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware’s nothing more than a really complicated space heater.
