This is from Rudy Rucker‘s recent novel, Postsingular:
But you have to be kidding about including all that data. Just do a link. If you put too much into a metanovel, it’s as dull as a nearly empty file. Everything and Nothing are the same, you feel me? Aim your frame.
The speaker is one Darlene, the proprietor of the store Metotem Metabooks, a “hangout for the Mission metanovelists” in the sci-fi-ified San Francisco, California, that is the setting for Rucker’s book. This San Francisco exists in a world rapidly, and only recently, transformed by the arrival of ubiquitous sentient technology. Darlene is speaking to one of the book’s main characters, a street urchin named Thuy, who had just proposed including in her book-in-progress, tentatively titled Wheenk, all of the meta-texts in Darlene’s shop — “to capture,” as Thuy puts it, “the full ambience. Every word, every page, all of it part of Wheenk, all visible in one synoptic glance.” Darlene educates her on the value of judicious editing.
Postsingular was published by Tor in October of last year, and it is also available as a free download in various formats at rudyrucker.com/postsingular.