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.

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

I just took [my cancer diagnosis] as bad luck, basically. It did strike me almost immediately, my atheist sort of thing kicked in and I thought "ha, if I was a God-botherer, I'd be thinking, why me God? What have I done to deserve this?" and I thought at least I'm free of that, at least I can simply treat it as bad luck and get on with it.

Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.

I don't really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out there.

What's one more meaningless act of violence on that zoo of a planet? It would be appropriate. When in Rome; burn it.

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.