We made the world uninhabitable for ourselves and it can only be inhabited by robots and androids.

In the cross-over, you get to a point where you realize that you've got all this genetic inheritance, and you've got all this social conditioning, but there is a point where you do have to make a choice, and that's the optimist in me: you have the freedom to make a choice about how you are going to be, and what you're going to do.

I'm not running away, I'm moving on.

It's different in Scotland. People who come to readings are more interested in literature as such, but the readership in general is really quite diverse. It's a cliche, but it's said that people who read my books don't read any other books, and you do get that element.

The first time I went to West Virginia I was surprised by how poor it was. It was like north India, there's kids running around in bare feet. The white working class has been disenfranchised as well. It's been disenfranchised by the liberal-left as well as the conservative-right. You really have to get people right across America and Britain and Europe and the world as a whole concentrating on the economic issues that affect them, because when you don't have that, you have all these phony, racist and cultural wars, and sexist wars.

I'm always watching people over a short time frame, putting them in an extreme position. Sometimes you don't see the humanity in a person because the time frame is so short and the circumstance so extreme.

I'd always done a lot of sniffing glue as a kid. I was very interested in glue, and then I went to lager and speed, and I drifted into heroin because as a kid growing up everybody told me, 'don't smoke marijuana, it will kill you'.