My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.

I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.

I'm a great believer in outlines.

They were...well, Beautiful People! - not 'students', 'clerks', 'salesgirls', 'executive trainees' - Christ, don't give me your occupation-game labels! We are Beautiful People, ascendant from your robot junkyard.

Television reporters aren't really called reporters. They are called researchers. And that's really all they are.

No machines will ever truly fully figure the brain out, because the brain's performance is constantly altered or else constrained by this inanimate, rogue artifact you can't control, namely, speech.

I think of evolution as a myth, like the Norse myths, the Greek myths - anybody's myths. But it was created for a rational age.