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

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.

I can see television much more easily than I can see features, because the economy and politics of making big, big features seems to me to be narrowing even from what it was.

I've gone to big stadium rock concerts at some artist's invitation, and there's this invariable, fascinating and rather sad situation of concentric circles of availability. There are Green Rooms within Green Rooms literally within Green Rooms. There are seven or eight degrees of exclusivity, and within each circle of exclusivity, everyone is so happy to be there, and they don't know that the next level exists.

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

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.