"I don't think a show's ever changed networks in the middle of the season before, but it was cool because they gave us those extra couple years of life that was necessary to get us to syndication."

"With a hundred and seventy-eight machines to sequence the precise order of the billions of chemicals within a molecule of DNA, B.G.I. Produces at least a quarter of the world's genomic data - more than Harvard University, the National Institutes of Health, or any other scientific institution."

"Can social progress be made without government?It's like saying 'can happiness be achieved without the initiation of violence? Can romance be achieved without rape? Can profitability be achieved without theft? Can economic growth be achieved without the mass indebted enslavement and counterfeiting of the federal reserve?'."

"The prevailing - and foolish - attitude is that a good manager can be a good manager anywhere, with no special knowledge of the production process he's managing. A man with a financial background may know nothing about manufacturing shoes or cars, but he's put in charge anyway."

"It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow-dark sky."

"You're always aware that only eight per cent of actors are in work at one time, so you've got to be thankful for the job you've got and do the best you can."

"Proformas rarely perform; missed projections are more often the norm. Still, we skew them up high, we miss but we try, for proformas which rarely perform."

"The first move was to turn to the one great, perfectly visible and certified revolution in the recent history of the human race [the Google search-engine]."