Sometimes reactions can be quite surprising: readers like things that you, the author, feel you've barely gotten away with; or they dislike one of the parts you secretly think is one of your little gems.

I tried for the longest time to find out what deconstructionism was. Nobody was able to explain it to me clearly. The best answer I got was from a writer, who said, 'Honey, it's bad news for you and me.

His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.

Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.

Having been brought up among the biologists and having followed various debates about ways to improve the human template and other debates about the true nature of our nature, I began seriously to wonder: What if? We hold in our hands a tool that is more powerful - for good or ill - than any we have wielded before.

I saw all of the films [based on The Tempest] available, including the one with Helen Mirren in which Prospero is Prospera - you wonder, "Would it work?" But it does, because anything she does works.

The trickle-down theory of economics has it that it's good for rich people to get even richer because some of their wealth will trickle own, through their no doubt lavish spending, upon those who stand below them on the economic ladder. Notice that the metaphor is not that of a gushing waterfall but of a leaking tap: even the most optimistic endorsers of this concept do not picture very much real flow, as their language reveals" pg. 102.