It's good to leave your room super-messy when you're away. Whoever tries to break into your room will thought it has already been ransacked.

We live in strange times. We also live in strange places, each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universe are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own.

There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now... What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams.

In the old days, writers used to sit in front of a typewriter and stare out of the window. Nowadays, because of the marvels of convergent technology, the thing you type on and the window you stare out of are now the same thing.

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.

One of the problems of taking things apart and seeing how they work - supposing you're trying to find out how a cat works--you take that cat apart to see how it works, what you've got in your hands is a non-working cat. The cat wasn't a sort of clunky mechanism that was susceptible to our available tools of analysis.

I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are not good.