Idealists and reformers all become executioners in their turn. The road to utopia ends with the steps of the scaffold, the endless moment of the guillotine.

We tell our children they’re trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions, then raise a disapproving...

It’s always the same with lost people; you start out looking for them, and you end up losing yourself.

If this book has made any point clear, I hope it’s that things don’t have to be real to be true. Or vice versa.

The interior of our skulls contains a portal to infinity.

One must commit acts of the highest treason only when dressed in the most resplendent finery.

He read me extracts from a medical journal describing the progress of a staphylococcus aureus infection. And then he pleasured me with a potato.

It’s salt. Why don’t you sprinkle some on me, honey? Aren’t I just good enough to eat?

Enough madness? Enough? And how do you measure madness? – The Joker

May in Varanasi. 25° and wet. It’s like the 6th circle of the inferno here, Edith – where they flail the arses off the howling heretics and the men who fuck marine life etc. NATO’s...

We’re the new power, come to replace the old. Cameras in the head, children with microchips, spin doctors rewriting reality as it happens.

Superhero science has taught me this: Entire universes fit comfortably inside our skulls. Not just one or two but endless universes can be packed into that dark, wet, and bony hollow without breaking it open...

Adults…struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire...

Individual humans are not super, but the organism of which we are all tiny cellular parts is most certainly that. The life-form that’s so big we forget it’s there, that turns minerals on its planet...

Sometimes I feel like I’m writing pornography in the notebook of the gods.

I just wanted all the wars to be over so that we could spend the money on starships and Mars colonies.

mmmmen stink! bossss stink! hungry

Then I reminded myself that all intelligent children suffer bad dreams.

Before it was a Bomb, the Bomb was an Idea. Superman, however, was a Faster, Stronger, Better Idea.

If our shallow, self-critical culture sometimes seems to lack a sense of the numinous or spiritual it’s only in the same way a fish lacks a sense of the ocean.

To know that we are only angels weighed down by filth, free of guilt? The bacteria in our bellies are responsible for the farts which shame us, tiny monsters shitting in their billions all over...

Writers and artists build by hand little worlds that they hope might effect change in real minds, in the real world where stories are read. A story can make us cry and laugh, break our...

I see now the virtue in madness, for this country knows no law nor any boundary. I pity the poor shades confined to the Euclidean prison that is sanity

Ah, I feel a sadness on me, Dane. That’s how the Irish people say it. In their language, you can’t say, “I am sad,” or “I am happy”. They understood what we English have long...

I’m just an actor. My performance is not more important than your life. Stop watching. We’re false images designed to sell you products by exploiting your insecurities. To make you spectators in life, not participants.

Modern man has successfully razed the imaginative landscapes of primal peoples the whole world over. Kill the gods first, slaughter the sacred animals, rewrite the mythologies, and build roads through the holy places. Do all...