I grew up in southwestern Virginia. I was born in South Carolina, but only because my parents had a vacation cabin or something there on the beach. I was like a summer baby. But I did grow up in the South. I grew up in serious, serious Appalachia, in a very small town.

Magazines in the traditional sense were aggregators of novelty. A good magazine was a lot of novelty, stuff you've never heard of before, clearly aggregated by people who have been able to travel further and dig deeper than you have been able to do. And that used to be really an important source of stuff for me. And now it is less important because the Internet has eaten it all up. But my Twitter feed as an aggregator of novelty is like... I don't know what I would do if it became any more powerful, I would have to start reining it in somehow.

When I start writing a new imaginary future, I have no idea what it is. The characters arrive first. They help me figure out where they are living and I get to fill in the gaps with that and where we are. So when I get to the end of the process of composition, if I feel that I have really done my job, I have no idea what I've got - and I then spend essentially the rest of my life figuring out what it might mean.

I'm not a very intentional writer. I try to be as unintentional as possible. What I basically try to do is invite the zeitgeist in to tea.

I've gone to big stadium rock concerts at some artist's invitation, and there's this invariable, fascinating and rather sad situation of concentric circles of availability. There are Green Rooms within Green Rooms literally within Green Rooms. There are seven or eight degrees of exclusivity, and within each circle of exclusivity, everyone is so happy to be there, and they don't know that the next level exists.

His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.(Speaking about Ronald Reagan)

The future is here - it just has not been uniformly distributed.