If I meet someone and discover that they're an absolute, very earnest nationalist, it's unlikely that I'm going to get much closer to them. I don't understand them. It doesn't matter where they're from, I just don't get it. I'm a multi-national kind of guy.

His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines.

To some extent I'm guilty of wishful thinking. The absence of the interstitial I find unbearable.

The street finds its own uses for things.

In effect, I grew up in a sort of timewarp, a place where times are scrambled up. There are elements of my childhood that look to me now, in memory more like the 1940s or the 1950s than the 1960s. Jack [Womack] says that that made us science fiction writers, because we grew up experiencing a kind of time travel.

I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity. Its record for being accurately predictive is really, really poor! If you look at the whole history of science fiction, what people have said is going to happen, what writers have said is going to happen, and what actually happened - it's terrible.

I realized that everyone in Western society, in some weird way, believes that they've had the experience of producing feature films.