I think that the collectible ephemera craze/awareness is probably driven by a reverse market, rebounding off the sense of everything being mass-produced. It's the last step you take in trying to find something unique.

Part of the core of my system, is a way of trying to give the characters more control. If I'm practicing making up what the characters will do, it's never good. In fact, when I catch myself doing that, I try to get rid of that section, and try and let them start making the decisions.

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.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead station.

I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil.

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.

Maybe I've been a small part of the democratisation of celebrity, because I've been fascinated by it, and when it started to happen to me to the very limited extent that it happens to writers in North America, I was exposed to people who had the disease of celebrity. People who had raging, raging, life-threatening celebrity, people who would be in danger if they were left alone on the street without their minders. It's a great anthropological privilege to be there.