The designers [of the 1930s] were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.

We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.

I find it interesting to see people - mostly people who are younger than I am - going to considerable trouble to try to reproduce things from an era that was far more physical, from a less virtual day. That fascinates me, because it seems to be symbolic of something going on in the culture itself, and I also have a sort of innate admiration for the stubbornness it requires to actually make those things physically. It's become incredibly difficult. In North America, we've largely forgotten how to do it.

Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.

I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.

For years I have been mourning and not for my dead, it is for this boy for whatever corner in my heart died when his childhood slid out of my arms.

When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.