You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

I have told the story I was asked to tell. I have closed it, as so many stories close, with a joining of two people. What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in our bodies that we accept or end our slavery. So I wrote this book for my friend, with whom I have lived and will die free.

I think what's happening is, it's all - fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever - finally being called, being admitted to be literature. The way it used to be, before the Realists and the bloody Modernists took over.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else