The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning.

The truth is “#9dream” is a descendant of “Norwegian Wood”. Both are ghost stories. “She” in “Norwegian Wood” curses you with loneliness. The “Two spirits dancing so strange” in “#9dream” bless you with harmony. But...

Travel far enough, you meet yourself.

I wonder who had the first computer dream, where, and when? I wonder if computers ever dream of humans.

Nonfiction that smells like fiction is neither.

Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things—like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale. One night in Hiroshima it occurred to me...

What man ain’t the honestest cove in his own eyes?” Grote’s round face is a bronze moon in the dark. “‘Tain’t good intentions what paves the road to hell: it’s self-justifyin’s.

A single night is stuffed with minutes, but they leak out, one by one.

One’s ribs shouldn’t be prison bars.

The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.

True metamorphosis doesn’t come with flowcharts

Quienquiera que se inventase eso de que el dinero no hace la felicidad, se regocija Lloyd Hooks, está claro que no tenía bastante.

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.

Human cruelty can be infinite. Human generosity can be boundless.

Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.

After ten pages I felt that Nietzsche was reading me, not I him.

I asked, how is knowledge found? ‘You must learn how to read, little sister,’ he said.

All these people like my mother paying counselors and clinics to reattach them to reality; all of us people here paying Sony and Sega to reattach us to unreality.

Wait till the power grids start failing in the 2030s and the datavats get erased. It’s not far away. The future looks a lot like the past.

If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.

When you win, the rules change, and you find you’ve lost

to feel his dagger tickle your kidneys.”)

Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the theory of relativity and principals of uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed...

Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

Power will notice you. Power is watching you now. Carry on as you are, and power will favor you. But power will also laugh at you, mercilessly, as you lie dying in a private clinic,...

You say you’re ‘depressed’ – all i see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn’t mean you’re defective – it just means you’re human.

I recalled my father-in-law’s aphorism “To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom…” & I pretended to extract a speck from my eye.

I watched the stars and thought of other lives.

Hobbies are for pleasure, but rituals keep you going.

The last of the cherry blossom. On the tree, itturns ever more perfect. And when it’s perfect, it falls. And then of course once it hits theground it gets all mushed up. So it’s only...

Italians give their city sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London’s middle-aged and male, respectably married...

Survival often demands our courage.

London is a language. I guess all places are.

I put my hand on the altar rail. ‘What if … what if Heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you’re dying of thirst, or...

Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book.

Think larger. Redraw what is possible.

Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman.

¡Y cuando exhales el último suspiro, sólo entonces, te darás cuenta de que tu vida no ha sido más que una minúscula gota en un océano infinito!Y sin embargo, ,qué es un océano sino una...

Coming soon, to a Present near you.

Don’t worry, all is well. All is so perfectly, damnably well.

Surgeons are a singular brotherhood, Adam. To us, people aren’t sacred beings crafted in the Almighty’s image, no, people are joints of meat; diseased, leathery meat, yes, but meat ready for the skewer & the...

The sun was deaf’nin’ so high up, yay, it roared an’ time streamed from it.

…there ain’t no journey what don’t change you some.

A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.

The present is a battleground . . . where rival what-ifs compete to become the future ‘what-is.’ How does one what-if prevail over its adversaries? The answer . . . ‘Military and political power, of...

Not a clue – and, no, I don’t touch drugs. The world’s unstable enough without scrambling your brain for kicks.

…that human hunger birthed the Civ’lize, but human hunger killed it too.

The world’s a headmaster who works on your faults. I don’t mean in a mystical or Jesus way. More how you’ll keep tripping over a hidden step, over and over, till you finally understand: Watch...

Fire’s the sun, unwindin’ itself out o’ the wood.

I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so. In moments...