There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt.

Our biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past.

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea.

Genres aren't closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers

Your friend is intellectually honourable," Jimmy's mother would say. "He doesn't lie to himself.

Immortality,' said Crake, ' is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immortality' is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you'll be.