We are a race prone to monsters, she thought, and when we produce one we worship it.

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

Imagine a vast and glittering ocean seen from a great height. It stretches to the clear curved limit of every angle of horizon, the sun burning on a billion tiny wavelets. Now imagine a smooth...

I love writing and can’t imagine not being able to do it. I want an easy life and if it had been difficult doing it I wouldn’t be doing it. I do admire writers who...

Oh, adjust yourself. You people have spent ten millennia playing at soldiers while becoming ever more dedicated civilians. We’ve spent the last thousand years trying hard to stay civilian while refining the legacy of a...

He lay, often, looking at her sleeping face in the new light that fell in through the open walls of the strange house, and he stared at her skin and hair with his mouth open,...

It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of...

I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able to accept that you’re just this collection of cells, intelligent...

It gripped her hand gently. ‘Regret is for humans,’ it said.She laughed. ‘Really?’The machine shrugged and let go of her hand. ‘Oh, no. It’s just something we tell ourselves.

It meant something to climb, to haul this sack of bones and flesh all this way, and then look, then think, then be. She could have taken a flyer here any time when she’d been...

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...

As a matter of fact I did flirt with Socialism, in my youth.””That when you were in university, was it?”He smiled. “Yes. University. But then I saw how much more comfortable life could be as...

Everything was a metaphor; all things were something other than themselves. The pain, for example, was an ocean, and he was adrift on it. His body was a city and his mind a citadel. All...

It was a warship, after all. It was built, designed to glory in destruction, when it was considered appropriate. It found, as it was rightly and properly supposed to, an awful beauty in both the...

Now, quite apart from the fact that, from the point of view of the Earther, socialism suffers the devastating liability of only exhibiting internal contradictions when you are trying to use it as an adjunct...

I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives...

They speak very well of you”.- “They speak very well of everybody.”- “That so bad?”- “Yes. It means you can´t trust them.

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

It could always all be unreal – how could you ever tell otherwise? You took it on trust, in part because what would be the point of doing anything else? When the fake behaved exactly...

It seemed perverse to some, but for all their apparent militarism the Gzilt had remained peaceful over many millenia; it was the avowedly peaceful Culture that had , within living memory, taken part in an...

His jaw was slack and his mouth open, and he wondered if perhaps he would drown eventually; drowned by the falling rain.

Welcome to the future, she thought, surveying all this wordage and tat. All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths, our shames and joys are just stuffing for your emptiness.

She’d asked him what it was like to be in there, doing nothing but then being woken up to speak to somebody you couldn’t see. He’d said that it was like being woken from a...

In life you hoped to do what you could but mostly you did what you were told and that was the end of it.

Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed,” he said. “And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry...

Ferbin’s father had had the same robustly pragmatic view of religion as he’d had of everything else. In his opinion, only the very poor and downtrodden really needed religion, to make their laborious lives more...

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

An intelligence completely dissociated from the physical, or at least an impression of it, was a strange, curiously limited and almost perverse thing, and the precise form that your physicality took had a profound, in...

The point is: what happens in heaven?”Unknowable wonderfulness?’ ‘Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn’t represent eternity. Our lives are about...

The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two kill the hereditary ritual assassins of the new Yearking’s immediate family by drowning them in the tears of the Continental Empathaur in its Sadness Season.

On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the...

That is the way with all of your kind… It is how you are made; you must all strive to claw your way over the backs of your fellow humans during the short time you...

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,...

There is something about the very idea of a city which is central to the understanding of a planet like Earth, and particularly the understanding of that part of the then-existing group-civilization which called itself...

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