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 don't think we know yet what broadcast television did to us, although it obviously did lots. I don't think we're far enough away from it yet to really get a handle on it. We get these things, I think they start changing us right away, we don't notice we're changing. Our perception of the whole thing shifts, and then we're in the new way of doing things, and we take it for granted.

Art Deco for me except in its most crazed and attenuated forms, it's jut a matter of taste.

I'm quite proud of what I anticipated about reality television from my books in the early '90s, which I based on the early seasons of 'Cops' and on the amazing stuff I had read about happening on Japanese shows and the British 'Big Brother'.

Enlightenment is "being," and it grows; it's end is serenity.

She walked on, comforted by the surf, by the one perpetual moment of beach-time, the now-and-always of it.

I think science fiction gives us a wonderful toolkit to disassemble and reexamine this kind of incomprehensible, constantly changing present that we live in, that we often live in quite uncomfortably.