I'm interested in people who become culturally fluent. And when I meet young people I'm often amazed they don't quite seem to have a sense of where they're from. They're like the citizens of the airport.

When I come to a new city is I combine: I say, well, it's like Barcelona and Edinburgh, though I can't imagine what that would be. But Toronto, the last few times I've been here, what always comes up is Chicago and West Berlin. It's a big, sprawling city beside a lake, of a certain age and a certain architectural complexity. But the high-end retail core looks more like West Germany than the Magnificent Mile. Yonge Street is like K-Damm. There's an excess of surface marble and bronze: it's Germanic and as pretentious as pretentious can be.

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.

Our hardware is likely to turn into something like us a lot faster than we are likely to turn into something like our hardware...I very much doubt that our grandchildren will understand the distinction between that which is a computer and that which isn't.

We see in order to move; we move in order to see.

I'm often saddened and dismayed to see myself portrayed as either a Luddite or as a raving technophile. I've always thought that my job was to be as anthropologically neutral about emerging technologies as possible.

A part of that [timewrap] for me was growing up in a culture that violence had always been a part of. It wasn't an aberration, though I realize that in retrospect. I grew up in the part of the U.S. where all of Cormac McCarthy's novels are set and that's a pretty violent place.