He walked into the bathroom, wincing at himself in the mirror, that always more tired older brother.

In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.

Kandinski looked up. ‘Do you read science fiction?’ he asked matter-of-factly.’Not as a rule,’ Ward admitted. When Kandinski said nothing he went on: ‘Perhaps I’m too skeptical, but I can’t take it too seriously.’Kandinski pulled...

Their violence (the jungle wars of the ’70s), and all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral exploration of sensation that is taking place, within sex as elsewhere and the sense that the perversions are...

All around them were the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers. They lined the verges of the roads and floated in the canals, jammed together around the pillars of the bridges. In the trenches between the...

Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.

The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water.

Sex × Technology = the Future.

The white façades of the villas and apartment houses were like blocks of time that had crystallised beside the road.

The ultimate concept car will move so fast, even at rest, as to be invisible.

Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.

Dissembling was so large a part of middle-class life that honesty and frankness seemed the most devious stratagem of all. The most outright lie was the closest one came to truth.

Miriam – I’ll give you any flowers you want!’ Rhapsodising over the thousand scents of her body, I exclaimed: ‘I’ll grow orchids from your hands, roses from your breasts. You can have magnolias in your...

No one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: …there’s a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the...

We have annexed the future into our present as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us

Below the bows of the Arrawa a child’s coffin moved onto the night stream. Its paper flowers were shaken loose by the wash of a landing craft carrying sailors from the American cruiser. The flowers...

The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented.

Once it gets off the ground into space, all science fiction is fantasy.

Recently she had become intrigued by the admiring glances of other women. The admiration of her own sex existed on a higher and more intense plane than anything men could offer, like the romantic rivalries...

As Miriam released my hand I felt that she and Midwife Bell had returned to a more primitive world, where men never intruded and even their role in conception was unknown. Here the chain of...

Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don’t you realize that those two species are extinct now?

She glanced at her watch, reminding herself who she was.

…reason rationalizes reality for him (Dr. Nathan) as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects about which...

Jim knew that he was awake and asleep at the same time, dreaming of the war and yet dreamed of by the war.

If their work is satisfying people don’t need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the...

Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.

Strangman shrugged theatrically. “It might,” he repeated with great emphasis. “Let’s admit that. It makes it more interesting—particularly for Kerans. ‘Did I or did I not try to kill myself?’ One of the few existential...

The 90’s map the decades to come – full of invisible technologies that will ‘sub-contract’ many of the functions of the central nervous system.

He methodically basted the dark skin of the Alsatian, which he had stuffed with garlic and herbs.”One rule in life”, he murmured to himself. “If you can smell garlic, everything is all right”.

I’m a strong opponent of all religious belief.(Conversations pg 96)

His mother and father were agnostics, and Jim respected devout Christians in the same way that he respected people who were members of the Graf Zeppelin Club or shopped at the Chinese department stores, for...

The trouble with you people is that you’ve been here for thirty million years and your perspectives are all wrong. You miss so much of the transitory beauty of life.

Even their insistence on educating their children, the last reflex of any exploited group before it sank into submission, marked the end of their resistance.

However, for all his affection and loyalty towards the animal, the dog would soon be leaving him – they would both be present at a celebratory dinner when they reached the roof, he reflected with...

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to...

All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its...

…the arts and criminality have always flourished side by side.

A kind of banalization of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup.

They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never dissapointed.

To his surprise he felt a moment of regret, of sadness that his quest for his mother and father would soon be over. As long as he searched for them he was prepared to be...

First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him. Then, the moment he...

The marriage of reason and nightmare that dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money...

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

She had originally agreed to appear naked, but on seeing the cars informed me that she would only appear topless—an interesting logic was at work there.

The Thames Shouldered its way past Blackfriars Bridge, impatient with the ancient piers, no longer the passive stream that slid past Chelsea Marina, but a rush of ugly water that had scented the open sea...

These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which,...

Sex is now a conceptual act, it’s probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all.

In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one’s legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.