Anyway, to cut off one's biological dreams seems to me the most fundamental form of psychic castration that you could imagine.

I grew up with tarot cards and the reading of tea leaves.

My favourite tea is lapsang souchong.

I'm more a dog person than a cat person.

I grew up in North Devon, by the sea, and feel a special affinity for the landscape there, despite a lack of actual ancestry.

I was born in the seventies, age of bad haircuts and grainy colour photos.

I've never been baptised.

[My muse] is, in fact, a woman of the world, and precisely because of this, hopes that a diversity of cultures will endure, and that one bland monoculture does not swamp everything.

If we do want to do that [ colonise space to survive, ], then vacuous materialism is not going to be enough for us.

If we do overcome linear time, I would hope this means dwelling more directly in the fertility of the imagination rather than denying it, as some aspects of Buddhism seem to.

Some Buddhists, however, never seem to get past the void, and I suppose I view this as a kind of Buddhist 'Old Testament' that I don't especially like.

I am an atheist.

Being able to endure is sometimes the key to survival.

If everyone invested in the neighborhood they lived in, the United States would be a magical place.

Every year I make a plan. I do it. It will be done.

Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself, something that encompasses you but is not defined by your existence alone.

There is no bravery in evil, no true courage in behavior that can only result in deep disappointment.

I love making things. I love building things. I love the idea that something's in the world that wasn't there before.

I call my wife and talk to my children four or five times a day. I've surrounded myself with great people and friends, plus I'm always willing to make amends.

I think everyone needs a goal. And what kind of goal will be important. And for that we have to study and we have to be intelligent.

Everybody has an instinctive desire to do good things and avoid evil. But that desire is sterile as long as we have no experience of what it means to be good.