The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies drive them on?

We're facing growing climate change, more floods, more droughts, more crisis on a planetary level, and the systems we put in place in the twentieth century are just not going to work. We've run out of stuff. Our big problems are going to be energy supplies and food supplies. This is not a right-left issue. It's a people issue, and it cuts across all our categories.

People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never wrong. Also they never fart.

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

You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn.

A non-event ... is better to write about than an event, because with a non-event you can make up the meaning yourself, it means whatever you say it means.

Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?