I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies.

If you give a writer a pile of blank paper and say you can write anything you like on any subject you want at any length you want, you will probably never get anything at all, whereas if you have 900 words to write, and it's fiction that is somehow op-ed fiction, and it needs to tie in with Halloween . . . okay, those are my constraints, that's where I now need to start building something.

You don't have to test everything to destruction just to see if you made it right.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation.

Night was spreading slowly around the spinning Earth. It should have been full of pinpricks of light. It was not. There were five billion people down there. What was going to happen soon would make barbarism look like a picnic - hot, nasty, and eventually given over to the ants.

I can get away before the storm hits. Away from a world in which opiates have become the religion of the masses.

If you are protected from dark things then you have no protection of, knowledge of, or understanding of dark things when they show up.