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.

The written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country.

Occasionally if I look back at something I've written I'll find one of those that I don't understand, but that's a bad thing - the unconscious has dealt me a bad hand.

He took a duck in the face at 250 knots.

My problem is that all things are increasingly interesting to me

I had a lot of issues with the genre, and I probably even had issues with the whole idea of genre. I was coming into it with a certain degree of outsider attitude, and I didn't have a long-term plan. But I think the way it's worked out, it's sort of warped into what I suppose you could say is my own genre. If people like my books, they have some idea of what the next one will be like.

We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.