By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.

I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.

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.

Experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.

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

I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my secret catechism.

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.