A reality that is electronic... Once everybody's got a computer terminal in their home, to satisfy all their needs, all the domestic needs, there'll be a dismantling of the present broadcasting structure, which is far too limited and limiting.

The functional freedom that anybody can buy a gun and go out and murder a lot of people at a McDonald's is prevalent, yes. But through the effects of TV and interactive video systems and so forth, we'll also have the freedom to pretend to be a mass murderer for the evening. I've seen descriptions of advanced TV systems in which a simulation of reality is computer controlledthe TV viewer of the future will wear a special helmet. You'll no longer be an external spectator to fiction created by others, but an active participant in your own fantasies/dramas.

It was an excess of fantasy that killed the old United States, the whole Mickey Mouse and Marilyn thing, the most brilliant technologies devoted to trivia like instant cameras and space spectaculars that should have stayed in the pages of Science Fiction . . . some of the last Presidents of the U.S.A. seemed to have been recruited straight from Disneyland.

People will begin to explore all the sidestreets of sexual experience, but they will do it intellectually. . . . Sex won't take place in the bed, necessarily--it'll take place in the head!

I work for three or four hours a day, in the late morning and early afternoon. Then I go out for a walk and come back in time for a large gin and tonic.

Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I'm intensely interested in change - probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?

The car as we know it is on the way out.