"Cyberspace is everting." It's interpenetrating our everyday reality to the point that on-line is our normal waking state.

Things aren't different. Things are things.

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

When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.

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

The culture is still there, and people are still doing it. I imagine some people are doing it very well indeed. As for me, it definitely was my native literary culture. Science fiction was where I'm from, but on the way to now, I went through a lot of other territory, and I wasn't really that culturally conventional an SF writer when I started.

I worry about what we'll do in the future, [about the instantaneous co-opting of pop culture]. Where is our new stuff going to come from?