Mr Blawke always reminded me of a heron; I’m not sure why. Something to do with a sense of rapacious stillness, perhaps, and also the aura of one who knows time is on his side.

I still have some of my old University essays, and I do still have my drawing book from primary year seven.

I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my secret catechism.

Technology determines the possibilities of society. It doesn’t matter whether you start out from a fascist state or a communist state or a free-market state

You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing’s a double skill, really.

My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.

Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.

By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.

As a writer, you get to play, you get alter time, you get to come up with the smart lines and the clever comebacks you wish you’d thought of.

I enjoy it too much – even if I knew I’d never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.

It’s a library, only the stupid or the evil are afraid of those

All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people’s, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid.

There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.

Experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.

An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.

It was the day my grandmother exploded.

I remember being shocked when I discovered some of my school pals didn’t have books in their homes. I thought it was like not having oxygen, or hot water.

One of the advantages of having laws is the pleasure one may take in breaking them.

One of your American professors said that to study religion was merely to know the mind of man, but if one truly wanted to know the mind of God, you must study physics.

Empires are synonymous with centralized if occasionally schismatized hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through usually a judicious use of oppression and skilled manipulation of both the society’s information dissemination systems and its lesser as a rule nominally independent power systems. In short, it’s all about dominance.

After doing extensive research, I can definitely tell you that single malt whiskies are good to drink.

I am not being obtuse. You are being paranoid.

I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.

Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.

People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it is. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped.

Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.

There has seldom if ever a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.

If you have any helpful suggestions I’d be pleased to hear them. If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.

One should never regret one’s excesses, only one’s failures of nerve.

There’s an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.

My gratitude extends beyond the limits of my capacity to express it.

Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place – and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all – so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.

Political correctness is what right-wing bigots call what everybody else calls being polite

One should never mistake pattern for meaning.

The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others

But just because something does not have an ending doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a conclusion.

He knew all the answers. Everybody did. Everybody knew everything and everybody knew all the answers. It was just that the enemy seemed to know better ones.

Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.

There was something comforting about having a vast hydrogen furnace burning millions of tons of material a second at the centre of a solar system. It was cheery.

By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules.

The History Of The Universe In Three Words

CHAPTER ONE
Bang!

CHAPTER TWO
sssss

CHAPTER THREE
crunch.

THE END.

All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now.

Common misconception that; that fun is relaxing. If it is, you’re not doing it right.ain

So basically you’re sticking around to watch us all fuck up ?
Yes. It’s one of life’s few guaranteed constants.

But then, as she knew too well, the more fondly we imagine something will last forever, the more ephemeral it often proves to be.

Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot.

I had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered what reality was at the moment.

If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!

A guilty system recognizes no innocents.

The bomb lives only as it is falling.

I just took [my cancer diagnosis] as bad luck, basically. It did strike me almost immediately, my atheist sort of thing kicked in and I thought “ha, if I was a God-botherer, I’d be thinking, why me God? What have I done to deserve this?” and I thought at least I’m free of that, at least I can simply treat it as bad luck and get on with it.

Perdition awaits at the end of a road constructed entirely from good intentions, the devil emerges from the details and hell abides in the small print.f

Zakalwe, in all human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn’t.