"You like music, Mr. Gurgeh?" Hamin asked, leaning over to the man. Gurgeh nodded. "Well, a little does no harm."

Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.

Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot.

Mr Blawke always reminded me of a heron; I'm not sure why. Something to do with a sense of rapacious stillness, perhaps, and also the aura of one who knows time is on his side.

There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.

Torture is such a slippery slope; as soon as you allow a society or any legal system to do that, almost instantly you get a situation where people are being tortured for very trivial reasons.

My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.

I remember being shocked when I discovered some of my school pals didn't have books in their homes. I thought it was like not having oxygen, or hot water.

I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.

I've always loved Scotland, and I'm not a huge fan of big cities, to be honest. I like them to dip into for a bit, but I'm not sure I would want to live in one again.

In theory, I work an eight-hour day and a five-day week which means I can socialise with my pals who mostly have normal jobs like teaching and computer programming.

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

By my soul I swear, there is no power in the tongue of man to alter me.

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

Let us not become the evil that we deplore.

It takes courage to be creative. Just as soon as you have a new idea, you are in a minority of one.

Bureaucracy is like a fungus that contaminates everything.

There is no such thing as failure, there's just giving up too soon.

I started cutting my teeth on "Someone To Watch Over Me" [George Gershvin] in the college. I've sung that one for a while. There's something so simple and sweet about that lyric.

Racism really does exist.

It is fairly clear that many of the arguments against proposition testing are really arguments against propositions themselves.