Sublime

He loved reading stories in the American magazines that asked “What if?” and subtly questioned conventionally accepted assumptions and rules—both scientific and cultural.

Sylvanshine could almost literally see the small pink man drinking Pepto-Bismol straight out of the bottle and going home to a woman who treated him like an uninteresting stranger.

In his mind he was the protagonist of every story, the center of everyone’s appalling attention;

writing,

“If you’re looking for a cultural highlight that will still be talked about later, it would be a symptom of the thing that was set in motion—not the inventor itself. We talk about Twitter all the time, but rarely about the person who designed it.”

“Everything Max does is directed toward the whole effect of the book.... He believes in your characters; they become completely real to him.... He can take a mess of chaos, give you the scaffold, and then you build a house on it....