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.