The cynics are correct the sense of freewill is only that feeling which we have when we take the necessitated option that most appeals to us.

The whole aesthetics of computers very much feeds into my OCD. They fill my head with obsessionalities and my actions become very repetitive. It seems quite inimical to the dreamy state out of which fiction comes which seems so much less causally repetitive than the way one works on computers.

What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.

A party full of 'likeable' people doesn't bear contemplating.

Many of my works fall into the category of "Zeitgeist novels." Yet I hope that they aren't only reportage, but also attempts to convey the sense of the present to the future.

I'm an anarchist. I'm implacably opposed to heirarchical systems of power and control. I also mistrust crowds, as they often operate according to their lowest common denominator. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the crowd is very close to a herd of stampeding wildebeest.

If you believe something, you can have a morality that means something as well. You can feel recognized as an individual within the universe; it can give meaning to who you are.