I think that if the novels task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life – technology and science. – Richard Powers
My goal for technology has always been to reach a point where the technological mediation becomes invisible. – Richard Powers
This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world. – Richard Powers
Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery. – Richard Powers
We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Poet at the Breakfast Table, 1872