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.

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.

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.

The Universe may be stranger than we can imagine, but it's going to have a tough time outdoing Egan.

In war, our elders may give the orders...but it is the young who have to fight.

In raining bullets on those silent faces, already turned away from this world, you think you are disfiguring the face of our truth.

It's far more daunting than bowling to Ricky Ponting or facing Shane Warne

I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.

The condition-of-England question is a practical one. The condition of England demands a hero, not a poet.

My concern is to continue respecting my work as I've done since I began as an actor and I could only do that if I'm strong enough to keep on doing what I think best in an artistic way.

Together we will build an America where hope is a new job with a paycheck, not a faded word on an old bumper sticker.

I always read what I write out loud, and I did that long before any radio thing. My editor finds that unusual.

There's a hope for every woe, and a balm for every pain, but the first joys of our heart come never back again!

You know, Katie Couric is one of my favorite people.