I think the large part of the function of the Internet is it is archival. It's unreliable to the extent that word on the street is unreliable. It's no more unreliable than that. You can find the truth on the street if you work at it. I don't think of the Internet or the virtual as being inherently inferior to the so-called real.

"Cyberspace is everting." It's interpenetrating our everyday reality to the point that on-line is our normal waking state.

I think that one of the visions that is closest to reality is the cardboard city in the subway station in Tokyo, which is based very closely on a series of documentary photographs of people living like that and of the contents of the boxes. Those are quite haunting because Tokyo homeless people reiterate the whole nature of living in Tokyo in these cardboard boxes, they're only slightly smaller than Tokyo apartments, and they have almost as many consumer goods. It's a nightmare of boxes within boxes.

A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

Maybe I've been a small part of the democratisation of celebrity, because I've been fascinated by it, and when it started to happen to me to the very limited extent that it happens to writers in North America, I was exposed to people who had the disease of celebrity. People who had raging, raging, life-threatening celebrity, people who would be in danger if they were left alone on the street without their minders. It's a great anthropological privilege to be there.

I've been interested in autism since I've known about it, which is more or less since I've been writing.

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.