A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest. I think that kind of thing is an abuse of history.

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

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

We enjoy telling ourselves that we will soon be gods, masters of the planet, manipulating the genes of living creatures and rebuilding the world at a nano-level as we lie back in our hammocks, attended by our robot servants. I don't believe a word of it, and I'm not sure many of us do.

I’m increasingly attracted by the idea that there can be at least small pockets where life and character and beauty and meaning continue. If I could help protect one of those from destruction, maybe that would be enough. Maybe it would be more than most people do.

The world we are in today is likely to end catastrophically, as many other human worlds have done before.

Certainly our cultural fallback position seems to be that our technologies will get us out of everything they have got us into. That looks like a magical thinking to me, but we don't really have a better idea.