it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.

For the living, death is thievery.

It was important to me to put together a future history that would scan, and serve as the backdrop to the domestic story. Economics is really what drives the plot.

Notoriety is cheap. It's just easier to get noticed by doing something bad.

Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere exactly.

One of my problems with terrorism is that it's self-evidently bad. The main thing that makes it complicated is the fact that it works. When you go at it with a moral hammer, it's really, really bad. It's so bad you wouldn't believe it because you don't accomplish anything. I think the one thing terrorists themselves are vulnerable to is mockery. It's an excellent weapon.

You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.