Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.

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.

Technology determines the possibilities of society. It doesn't matter whether you start out from a fascist state or a communist state or a free-market state

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.

What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead?

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.

I deliberately keep myself apart from a lot of stuff; I don't Tweet, I don't do Facebook, I don't blog, and that's largely because I spend my working life staring at a screen and hitting a keyboard, I am trying to cut down on that, not increase it.