We live in an age of seriously crap mass clothing. They've made a science of it.

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.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

I was travelling with Bruce Sterling on our mutual Difference Engine tour and he became aware from the experience of travelling with me that I would distinguish among the shoes in a perfectly normal fashion, but form him it was a revelation. There's a very lyrical passage in Holy Fire about old wealthy European men and their shoes, and how beautiful their shoes are, and how there have never been shoes as beautiful. I think that that was probably as close as Bruce will ever get to homage in my direction. I made him aware of footwear fashion.

To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.

There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.

I have friends who go [Tokyo] frequently on business, and it sounds interesting. I've heard that they have for the first time serious drug problems.