When you get big, there's a tendency to get caught up in process and bureaucracy.
Paperwork will ruin any military force.
I wasn't always minimal. In the early days, I was laying it on as thickly as I could, trying very hard to get it right. But I found that the harder I tried, the more tired whatever it was I was working on looked. And then I grew tired of it as well.
Networks, especially, micro-manage everything to death.
If there's a criticism of 'Cassadaga' that I agreed with, it's that we left things in the oven too long, that songs were overstuffed, with too many ideas competing for space.
Don't put too many chefs to work. Sometimes they get too involved in the ingredients and are of no help.
World-building numbs the reader's ability to fulfill their part of the bargain because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done. Above all, world-building is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn't there.
Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,' because it's an oblate spheroid. They suffer from 'the curse of knowledge': the inability to imagine what it's like not to know something that they know.
In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.
Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.
