Novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written.

We don't legislate emergent technologies into existence. We almost never do. They just emerge, dragged forth by Adam Smith's invisible hand. Then we have to see what people are actually going to do with them, and try to legislate to take account of that.

The deadliest bullshit is odorless, and transparent.

As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.

[The currency of being celebrity] used to be only the elect had any manna in the information society and everyone else was a consumer.

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.

I was once really close to sitting down and having a conversation with a shadowy young woman who is reputed have become a millionaire by investing in Beanie Babies. She was someone that a couple people claimed to know, she seemed to exist, but she remained shadowy.