We like to think that the fate of the Earth and the fate of human worlds are the same thing, but we're not as important as that.

I do think that the legacy of the Norman conquest is still strong in Britain. Our hereditary monarchy, our established church, our ancient county structures, though hollowed out in many ways, are a direct result of what happened in 1066.

Hope, like despair, is something of a distraction: it gets in the way of a clear view of the horizon.

What does interest me is how difficult my culture seems to find it to look the dark side of life directly in the eye. It seems to me that if we look back at mediaeval culture, for example, we see a society which faces the reality of death and pain and limitation, because it has to. Our society, which is progressive and technological and seems to have a slightly fanatical utopian edge to it, gets very uncomfortable when anybody highlights the dark side of humanity, or the world we have built, or what we are doing to the rest of life on Earth.

In most novels, the landscape, or the place, in which the story takes part is simply a backdrop to the human action.

It's always hard for an author to determine his own intentions, especially in retrospect.

The mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be staked out like vampires in the sun, their chests pierced with rows of five-hundred-foot wind turbines and associated access roads, masts, pylons, and wires.