Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

It seems to me that what most of us have to fear for the future is not that something terrible is going to happen, but rather that nothing is going to happen... I could sum up the future in one word, and that word is boring. The future is going to be boring.

All through my career I've written 1,000 words a day - even if I've got a hangover. You've got to discipline yourself if you're professional. There's no other way.

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst.

Sleep is an eight-hour peep show of infantile erotica.