As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.

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

If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!

They speak very well of you". - "They speak very well of everybody." - "That so bad?" - "Yes. It means you can´t trust them.

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

One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve.

An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.