I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and among those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.

Writing is like everything else: the more you do it the better you get. Don't try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing. Accept imperfections. Get it finished and then you can go back. If you try to polish every sentence there's a chance you'll never get past the first chapter.

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

...and I confess that, like a child, I cry. Ah, self-pity; I think we are at our most honest and sincere when we feel sorry for ourselves.

I'm a devoted husband. That must strike you as totally deviant.

There is a quite a lot of effort involved but I find action sequences some of the quickest to write and the most fun.

Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.