The soul is a verb. . . . Not a noun.

The potatoes were starch grenades. The canned carrots were revolting because that is their nature.

What if the differences between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent xcellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge? Would this not mean the whole Pyramid is built on shifting sands?” I...

(…)entre todas las razas del mundo, nuestra sed, o mejor dicho, nuestra avidez, de tesoros, de oro, de especias y de dominio, ¡oh, si!, sobre todo del dulce dominio, ¡es la más aguda, la más...

Orito banishes all thoughts of Jacob de Zoet, and recalls Jacob de Zoet.

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.

I could never describe a race of savages too backwards to throw a spear as ‘noble.

The sacred is a fine hiding place for the profane.

Perfume counters in department stores, Holly Deblin smells of, the middle of July, and cinnamon Tic Tacs.

But thought has no eyelids to close or ears to block…

are a sordid, low-budget French film. The sort you’d stumble across on TV at night. You know you’ll regret it in the morning, but you keep watching anyway.

…It’s as if they actually think that what other people think of them somehow doesn’t matter. I mean, I know we’re all supposed to believe that, but obviously, none of us actually do. And nor...

I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I’ll be waiting for you there.

. . .my dreams are the single unpredictable factor in my zoned days and nights. Nobody allots them, or censors them. Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.

Cynicism can blind one to subtler virtues

The learnin’ mind is the livin’ mind… an’ any sort o’ smart is truesome smart, old smart or new, high smart or low.

Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction

This, explained the angel, is hell. The people do not love each other. They only want to feed themselves.

How about this? Hong Kong had been appropriated by British drug pushers in the 1840s. We wanted Chinese silk, porcelain, and spices. The Chinese didn’t want our clothes, tools, or salted herring, and who can...

There are different ways people make this place. Sweat, exercise and pain is one way. You can see them in the gyms, in the well-ordered swimming pools. You can see them jogging in the small,...

There no such thing as something! Why? Because everything’s already turning into something else!

Better a soulless clone… than a souled roach.

There’s no future in stories…Stories are things of the past, things for museums.

Her zaman başka bir savaş çıkar, Robert. Kökleri hiçbir zaman tamamen kazınmaz. Savaşları ne alevlendirir? Güç arzusu, insan doğasının belkemiği. Şiddet tehdidi, şiddet korkusu ya da şiddetin kendisi bu dehşet verici arzunun aracıdır. Güç arzusunu...

Holly steps back. Being warned about a ghost and seeing him are not the same. ‘What did they do to you?’Some of the Anchorites laugh. Hugo looks back at his long-ago lover. ‘They’-he looks about...

Loyalty looks simple… but it ain’t.

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year’s fragments into a ‘sextet for overlapping soloists’: piano, clarinet, ‘cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color....

Sometimes John had recorded new compositions, or lines from his new poems. Sometimes he’d just record a busy night in The Green Man. Sometimes sheep, seals, skylarks, the wind turbine. If Liam were home there...

Any society’s upper-crust is riddled with immorality, how else d’you think they keep their power? Reputation is king of the public sphere, not private. It is dethroned by public acts.

Empires die, like all of us dancers in the strobe-lit dark. See how the light needs shadows.

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.