Quotes

That's the trouble with trying to counter clichés-the counterclichés cliché quicker than shit off a shovel, and with that comes domestication. Either you lose any subversive gloss at all-the hip-hop which once fought the power now sells us jeans and cheese-or, what's perhaps worse, a horrible zombie gloss of radicalism is retained while you shuffle into the corridors of establishment, rotting.

I see myself very much as a genre writer. I love the fantastic genres. I see what I'm doing as a development of them but very much a part of them. I never feel that I'm leaving them behind. I try and be as experimental and avant-garde and stretching as I can be but I don't see that as turning my back on the genre at all. Genre has always been able to encompass that.

I am often asked "Is my work science fiction or fantasy?" and my answer is usually "Yes."

Nothing strikes me as more Utopian than the reformist belief that with a bit of tinkering and some good faith, we can systematically improve the world. You have to ask how many decades of broken promises and failed schemes it will take to disprove that hope.

On role-playing games: If you take something like Cthulhu in Lovecraft, for example, it is completely incomprehensible and beyond all human categorization. But in the game Call of Cthulhu, you see Cthulhu's "strength," "dexterity," and so on, carefully expressed numerically. There's something superheroically banalifying about that approach to the fantastic. On one level it misses the point entirely, but I must admit it appeals to me in its application of some weirdly misplaced rigor onto the fantastic: it's a kind of exaggeratedly precise approach to secondary world creation.

They think I'm old-fashioned? Is being against racism and hatred old-fashioned? OK, I'm old-fashioned.

If knowing the problem was the solution, most patients wouldn't need doctors at all.

Whoever's arguing fiercest for violence is the cop.

To take the choice of another is to forget their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a node in a matrix, that actions have consequences. We must not take the choice of another being. What is community but a means for all we individuals to have our choices.

This is what makes the world, I believe this to be the fundamental dynamic: transition. The point where one thing becomes another. It is what makes you, the city, the world, what they are. And that is the theme I'm interested in. The zone where the disparate become part of the whole. The hybrid zone.

We're all racing, but some of us in the wrong direction.

For every action, there's an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers-and one comes true.

Art's something you choose to make... it's a bringing together of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more of a person.

I'm not waiting to die, I don't believe I'll die. I am waiting for something else: To arrive. To understand. To be at my destination.

Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

Why wouldn't the gods of the world be giant squid? What better beast? It wouldn't take much to imagine those tentacles closing around the world, now would it?

There are people out there who'd rather be tools than people.

Why aren't the gods doing anything? Remember two things. The gods don't owe us anything. That's not why we worship. We worship because they're gods. This is their universe, not ours. What they choose they choose and it's not ours to know why.

I'm not a leftist trying to smuggle in my evil message by the nefarious means of fantasy novels. I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek. I love this stuff. And when I write my novels, I'm not writing them to make political points. I'm writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism, and what I want to do is communicate that.

I've invented this world that I think is really cool and I have these really big stories to tell in it and one of the ways that I find to make that interesting is to think about it politically. If you want to do that too, that's fantastic. But if not, isn't this a cool monster?

Tthere were as many unspeakable stories as there were men come back from war.

Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.

It is more foolish and childish to assume there is a conspiracy, or that there is not?

I see echoes with lots of books in all my books, some deliberate, some unconscious until later, and as long as that is respectful I think that's great - writing on the shoulders of other writers is a privilege.

On writer Ursula K. Le Guin: She was a colossus of literature, a radical, a trailblazer.