"Another example — maybe a better one, in a way — was when it was confirmed that Michael Jackson was going to marry Elvis Presley's daughter. A good friend of mine in the States faxed me, and he simply said, "This makes your job more difficult." And I knew exactly what he meant. 'Cos something — a scenario — that seemed to belong to the universe of the late Terry Southern, was suddenly real. It's that truth-is-stranger-than-fiction factor keeps getting jacked up on us on a fairly regular, maybe even exponential, basis. I think that's something peculiar to our time. I don't think our grandparents had to live with that."

“They don’t know they’re con men…wildly overconfident. Omnipotence, omniscience—that’s part of the mythology that surrounds the Special Forces…Your guy can walk in the door and promise training in something he personally doesn’t know how to do, and not even realize he’s bullshitting about his own capabilities. It’s a special kind of gullibility…psychic tactical equipment. The Army put him through schools that promised to teach him how to do everything, everything that matters. And he believed them.”

“COUNT ZERO INTERRUPT—On receiving an interrupt, decrement the counter to zero.”

“It had much more to do with my wanting to be with hippy girls and have lots of hashish than it did with my sympathy for the plight of the North Vietnamese people under US imperialism. Much more, much more to do with hippy girls and hashish.”

“We're an information economy. They teach you that in school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified…”

“You can do sneaky-ass," Winnie said, "Instinct tells me. Whose phone are you using?…I just e-mailed the number to someone, and they’re telling me the GPS is very amusing. Unless you’ve taken up marathon randomized teleportation.”

“Rydell had a theory about virtual real estate. The smaller and cheaper the physical site of a given operation, the bigger and cheesier the website.”