Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.

A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated?

If I wanted to be in movies, I'd have gone into scriptwriting: the fact that I write novels should be a big hint about what I prefer to do!

I drink tea pretty much continuously at a rate of around 1 imperial pint/hour, which sort of enforces screen/keyboard breaks.

If I write too much of anything for too long, I burn out on it. So it helps to vary my output from year to year.

All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.

The one thing that does happen, every time, though, is that I never get to write a book until I've already been thinking about it for a period of months to years.