The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we’re sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we’re not.

Looking back, it puzzles me that my parents decided to stay in Shanghai when they must have known that war was imminent. But the cotton works were my father’s responsibility, and duty then counted for...

What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.

Burroughs called his greatest novel ‘Naked Lunch,’ by which he meant it’s what you see on the end of a fork. Telling the truth. It’s very difficult to do that in fiction because the whole...

The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after.

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about...

I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic. A Buick radiator grille is as much a political statement as a Rolls Royce radiator grille,...

My upbringing was so middle-class and repressed. It wasn’t until I was placed in Lunghua that I met anyone from any other social strata. When I did, I found them colossally vital.

My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of ‘The Violation’ by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux. The original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, and I commissioned an artist...

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer’s role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

I only realised why I keep living in Shepperton when I returned to China. All the people who moved there had come from places just like Shepperton, and so they built and lived in houses...

Most writers flinch at the thought of being completely honest about themselves. So absolute honesty is what marks the true modern.

I could sum up the future in one word, and that word is ‘boring.’ The future is going to be boring.

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual...

The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand, and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing....

In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.

I had a very mixed kind of childhood reading. I read the childhood classics like ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ ‘Chums Annual.’ At the same time, I read an enormous number of American comics because...

I was born in the city’s general hospital on November 15, 1930, and we lived at 31 Amherst Avenue in the western suburbs. It was a magical place. There were receptions at the French Club,...

I came to live in Shepperton in 1960. I thought: the future isn’t in the metropolitan areas of London. I want to go out to the new suburbs, near the film studios. This was the...

I would love to have been a painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so much.

I don’t think it’s possible to touch people’s imagination today by aesthetic means.

Even one’s own home is a kind of anthology of advertisers, manufacturers, motifs and presentation techniques. There’s nothing ‘natural’ about one’s home these days. The furnishings, the fabrics, the furniture, the appliances, the TV, and...

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again… the...

I think it’s terribly important to watch TV. I think there’s a sort of minimum number of hours of TV a day you ought to watch, and unless you watch three or four hours of...

I’ve decided to recast myself as Utopian. I like this landscape of the M25 and Heathrow. I like airfreight offices and rent-a-car bureaus. I like dual carriageways. When I see a CCTV camera, I know...

I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF … No other form of fiction has the vocabulary...

Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.

E. Klimov’s ‘Come and See,’ about partisans fighting the Germans in Byelorussia, is the greatest anti-war film ever made.

I don’t think any particular painters have inspired me, except in a general sense. It was more a matter of corroboration. The visual arts, from Manet onwards, seemed far more open to change and experiment...

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract...

It’s true that I have very little idea what I shall be writing next, but at the same time I have a powerful premonition of everything that lies ahead of me, even ten years ahead.

In 1949 – my father stayed on in Shanghai after the war. But in 1949, the Communists took over the whole of China, and in fact, my father was caught by the Communists in Shanghai....

I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the basic process of coping with reality, just as actors need to act all the time to make...

An arts degree is like a diploma in origami. And about as much use.

I was in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China. I was there in Shanghai when, the morning after Pearl Harbor, they seized Shanghai.

I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed through English literature, probably for 400 or 500 years, well predating modern science.

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its...

People think that by living on some mountainside in a tent and being frozen to death by freezing rain, they’re somehow discovering reality, but of course that’s just another fiction dreamed up by a TV...

It is difficult to remember just how formal middle-class life was in the 1930’s and ’40s. I wore a suit and tie at home from the age of 18. One dressed for breakfast. One lived...

Consumerism is so weird. It’s a sort of conspiracy we collude in. You’d think shoppers spending their hard-earned cash would be highly critical. You know that the manufacturers are trying to have you on.

Morality covers our conduct, not what goes on inside our heads.

If you’re against globalisation, it doesn’t achieve much by sort of bombing the head offices of Shell or Nestle. You unsettle people much more by blowing up an Oxfam shop because people can’t understand the...

I would say that I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work, that I deliberately set up an obsessional frame of mind. In a paradoxical way, this leaves one free of the...

Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed.

During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence.

Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I’m intensely interested in change – probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going...

Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one’s conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves...

I admired anyone who could unsettle people.

I was terribly wounded by my wife’s death.