Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

Please don't make the mistake of thinking that 'Oryx and Crake' is anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it's neutral.

My brother and I were both teenage writers, and he was, I have to say, better than I was, but he went into science, and I went into writing.

The biggest debt is always the government debt; it's always debt that government has run up on your behalf.

There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.

Nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.

The temptation is to stay inside; to subside into the kind of recluse whom neighborhood children regard with derision and little awe; to let the hedges and weeds grow up, to allow the doors to rust shut, to lie on my bed in some gown-shaped garment and let my hair lengthens and spread out over the pillow and my fingernails to sprout into claws, while candle wax drips onto the carpet. But long ago I made a choice between classicism and romanticism. I prefer to be upright and contained—an urn in daylight.