The experience of celebrity is gradually being democratized.

I don't think of myself as being particulary a subversive writer, but I like to think that my work could afford someone else, the extra degree of freedom that I found when I first found science fiction.

I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil.

I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting.

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.

His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.

Our hardware is likely to turn into something like us a lot faster than we are likely to turn into something like our hardware...I very much doubt that our grandchildren will understand the distinction between that which is a computer and that which isn't.