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.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

You can get in a cab in Vancouver and the 20-year-old driver speaks more knowingly of Michael Ovitz than anyone in the industry. They just know! And it's perhaps not unhealthy.

People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary.

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'.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

We live in an age of seriously crap mass clothing. They've made a science of it.