I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate.

We have to rethink our whole energy approach, which is hard to do because we're so dependent on oil, not just for fuel but also plastic. If plastic vanished, there would be total chaos. We have to think quite carefully about using oil, and its derivatives, because it's not going to be around forever.

When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back. Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.

But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we're probably not going to see.

We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.