If you do it in the bookies, it's a bet. . . . If you pay some 23-year-old in an Armani suit two hundred grand to go to the window for you, it's a derivative.

I believe his lies, so he believes mine.' She turns and looks at me straight on. 'That's how it goes at the end of love.

People don't want the truth, ' he says, waving a hand at the streets around us. 'They want better-quality lies. High definition lies on fifty-inch screens.

It used to be the smartest people didn't always want to be the richest people.

Capitalism needs war.

I do not think my life would make a very interesting book, ' I say. 'I feel I can speak with a certain amount of authority here.

humans without humanity, a war-torn world for eternity

Both fictions and memories are recalled and retold. They're both forms of stories. Stories are the way we learn. Stories are how we understand each other.

Behavior slays the dragon of illusion and reveals the truth.

I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.

The basic unit of any society is the home. When the home begins to break, the society is on the way to disintegration.

I don't really care what's going on I just care about getting my job done the best that I can possibly do and deal with the other things in my life that take a lot of time and a lot of thought.

Can Protagonist think of a single film that interests him as much as the three-hundredth best book he ever read?

The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

I do not read SF as much as I used to. It's too much like a busman's holiday.

But films should be voyeuristic. What else is a film if you’re not snooping into somebody else’s lives?