“Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.”

“Conversely, a shallow, quick breath only half-nourishes, and is the partner of fear, nervousness and self-consciousness; whilst the uneven uncontrolled breath allows the person to become ‘beside themselves* with the emotional disturbance and indecision.”

“He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.”

“I think of Neuromancer as being, in a good sense, an adolescent book. It's a young man's book. It was written very young-man's-book. It was written by a man who was not very young, when he wrote it, but who was sufficiently immature.”

“Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his self-image. He still saw himself, in his mind's eye, as youthful, and when he caught sight of himself in photographs he usually collapsed … Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this, he had thought from time to time. Oh well, so it went.”

“The effort of explaining, even of expressing himself, had become, with the years, more and more terrifying to him. Whether from laziness or from inability to find the right words, he had developed almost a passion for silence.”

“… John the Baptist was like the Emperor Nerva. In his career it was given him to do two things—to inaugurate a new régime, and also to nominate a successor who was far greater than himself.”

“It was not fear that kept them from misusing what they had. It was self-respect.”

“There is much for a young writer to learn from our poorest writers. It is very destructive to burn bad books, almost more destructive than to burn good ones.”

“It may be a very little thing for you to say to a young man the few words that turn him from the way of ruin, and win him back to life and hope. It may be a very little thing to you; but it is every thing to the young man.”