I've been taking longer to write stories lately.

Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.

You know what they say the modern version of Pascal's Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God.

Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century.

Fandom is about fandom, it's a great big social club.

Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I've been led astray like that myself at times.

Being rewarded for anything other than the quality of their work is the fastest way to screw-up a writer-and it isn't only new ones who suffer from that.

For there is a truth which cannot be bought or sold, imposed by force, resisted or escaped.

I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.

I'm rarely grabbed by anything the way I was when I was 10 years younger. About the only relatively new artists whose albums I own are Beck, and They Might Be Giants.

On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed.

He said he preferred to feel the earth sing through his feet, and that shoes stopped you from hearing the song of the earth.

The genuine values in America arose from rational thought and breaking with tradition, not from blind allegiance to dirt and cloth.

In every life there is one particular event that is decisive for the entire person-for his fate, his convictions, his passions.

I've made this conscious decision to tell people on the street when I think they're wearing something great. If more people did that, the world would be a better place.

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic.

I am very proud to be British. I'm very conscious of carrying my country with me wherever I go. I feel I need to represent it well.

The Prayer of the sick person is his patience and his acceptance of his sickness for the love of Jesus Christ. Make sickness itself a prayer, for there is none more powerful, save martyrdom!

I was a gift to my mother. She was a remarkable person. God or nature, or whatever those forces are, smiled on her, then passed me the best of her.

All great music is contemporary. If it's still alive and kicking, then it's contemporary. If it fades away, it was a period piece. It had its moment, and that was it.

We should not try to design a better world. We should make better feedback loops.