Boredom is a fearsome prospect. There’s a limit to the number of cars and microwaves you can buy. What do you do then?

One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set… the comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives and all the rest of it… could be...

The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change.

The Internet is an amazing development.

I’ve seen descriptions of advanced TV systems in which a simulation of reality is computer-controlled; the TV viewer of the future will wear a special helmet. You’ll no longer be an external spectator to fiction...

There are signs, I think, that people aren’t satisfied by consumerism: that people resent the fact that the most moral decision in their lives is choosing what colour their next car will be.

I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst.

There are some people, who place enormous value on their home and feel that it defines them, that a stain on the carpet is a personal defilement. There are others, and I think I am...

The dream of empire died when Shanghai surrendered without a fight. Even at the age of 11 or 12, I knew that no amount of patriotic newsreels would put the Union Jack jigsaw together again....

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

I made a very slatternly mother, notably unkeen on housework, unaware that homes need to be cleaned now and then, and too often to be found with a cigarette in one hand and a drink...

Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent ambition which, of course, is fulfilled by many psychiatrists.

A reality that is electronic… Once everybody’s got a computer terminal in their home, to satisfy all their needs, all the domestic needs, there’ll be a dismantling of the present broadcasting structure, which is far...

Orwell’s ‘1984’ convinced me, rightly or wrongly, that Marxism was only a quantum leap away from tyranny. By contrast, Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ suggested that the totalitarian systems of the future might be subservient and...

There’s a logic today that places a greater value on celebrity the less it is accompanied by actual achievement. I don’t think it’s possible to touch people’s imagination today by aesthetic means.

There were no museums or galleries in Shanghai, but I was very keen on art – I was always sketching and copying, and sometimes I think that my whole career as a writer has been...

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.