I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy.

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it's about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

Younger people have greatest fears. Why is that? Because they don't know the plot. They don't know their own individual plot... they don't know what's going to happen to them.

The use of "religion" as an excuse to repress the freedom of expression and to deny human rights is not confined to any country or time.

I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow.