Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I love monsters.
I don't like allegory.
My Google-fu is strong.
I'm a very friendly socialist.
Anything for gold and experience.
I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek.
The dead are way more organized than the living.
I love it when people want to interpret my books.
Any moment called NOW is always full of possibles.
I think science fiction is very bad at prediction.
I couldn't tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.
Remember the movements that don't look like moving.
So long as it fated, fate didn't care what it fated.
I like the idea of trying to write a book in every genre.
Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.
London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness.
The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.
A sickly little smile grew and died on his mouth like a fungus.
Socialism and SF are the two most fundamental influences in my life.
A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.
Ever since I was two, I've loved octopuses, monsters, abandoned buildings.
...where's the skill in being a hero if you were always destined to do it?
I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.
We should have just killed him, that's a lesson, don't get creative with revenge
I'd never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer.
A trap is only a trap if you don't know about it. If you know about it, it's a challenge.
Is it more childish and foolish to insist that there is a conspiracy or that there is not?
My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give.
I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book.
I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice.
No one ever got into science fiction for the sex or prestige. They got into it because they love it.
My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.
Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.
I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion.
Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.
The problem with most genre fantasy is that it's not nearly fantastic enough. It's escapist, but it can't escape.
Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.
Everything has changed. I cannot be used anymore. Those days are over. I know too much. What I do now, I do for me.
Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.
In every book I write, I try to name-check the most prominent influences, or the most prominent conscious influences.
A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.
Fantastic fiction covers fantasy, horror and science fiction - and it doesn't get the attention it deserves from the literati.
Perhaps the window is not a sun but an asterisk, interrupting the grammar of the sky, with me sitting below it like a footnote.
Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.
A city like London was always going to be a paradox, the best of it so very riddled with the opposite, so Swiss-cheesed with moral holes.
There's plenty of stuff that I don't feel dissident about: I really like tea, I don't have any problem with that. I like lots of paintings.
I feel fantastically geeky. [But] I'm not one of those people who's enormously proud of being a geek, but nor am I particularly ashamed of it.
Every book I write, the first thing I have to do is get into the voice, and the voice varies from book to book - that's part of what's interesting to me.
It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.
You can't see the future, there's no such thing. It's all bets. You'll never get the same answer from two seers. But that doesn't mean either of them's wrong.