He knew all the answers. Everybody did. Everybody knew everything and everybody knew all the answers. It was just that the enemy seemed to know better ones.

Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.

A lot of what the 'Culture' is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.

Anyway, you can't leave her like that. You can't do that to the woman. She doesn't deserve it; nobody does. You don't belong to her and she doesn't belong to you, but you're both part of each other; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would still know she was part of you.

It was a truism that all civilizations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and apparent emptiness of the universe.

Most mainstream male fiction is littered with heroines, and female characters are basically so great, you want to fall in love with them.

I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.