[I've gone to big stadium rock concerts at some artist's invitation], and eventually you find yourself in the room with the Radiant Being around whom all this is revolving. It's very bizarre, and it's quasi-religious, or possibly genuinely religious. Spooky. It's a spooky and interesting thing.

Somewhere, deep within her, surfaces a tiny clockwork submarine. There are times when you can only take the next step. And then another.

I think I'd probably tell you that it's easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.

The ecological impact of book manufacture and traditional book marketing - I think that should really be considered. We have this industry in which we cut down trees to make the paper that we then use enormous amounts of electricity to turn into books that weigh a great deal and are then shipped enormous distances to point-of-sale retail.

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

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.

It had also been my belief since I started writing fiction that science fiction is never really about the future. When science fiction is old, you can only read it as being pretty much about the moment in which it was written. But it seemed to me that the toolkit that science fiction had given me when I started working had become the toolkit of a kind of literary naturalism that could be applied to an inherently incredible present.