Time is money, but also money is money.

I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting. I actually tend to suspect that in real life, there have always been very strong female characters, but at certain stages of society, they've been asked to cool it.

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.

Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others

I'm a really good eavesdropper. I listen to what people say and remember all the buzzwords.

That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.

I do not think an enormous permanent underclass is a very good thing to have if you're attempting to operate something that at least pretends sometimes to be a democracy.