So long as it fated, fate didn't care what it fated.

My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give.

I think when I was younger I found it very difficult to sustain interest in reading unless it had some sort of fantastic element. That's where I've changed. I can read books without fantastic elements now! But I wouldn't think of writing them.

A trap is only a trap if you don't know about it. If you know about it, it's a challenge.

You can't see the future, there's no such thing. It's all bets. You'll never get the same answer from two seers. But that doesn't mean either of them's wrong.

Probably one of the most enduring influences on me was a childhood playing RPGs: Dungeons and Dragons [D&D] and others. I've not played for sixteen years and have absolutely no intention of starting again, but I still buy and read the manuals occasionally. There were two things about them that particularly influenced me. One was the mania for cataloguing the fantastic: if you play them for any length of time, you get to know pretty much all the mythological beasts of all pantheons out there, along with a fair bit of the theology. I still love all that—I collect fantastic bestiaries, and one of the main spurs to write a secondary-world fantasy was to invent a bunch of monsters, half of which I'm sure I’ll never be able to fit into any books.

I do not dream.... I am a calculating machine that has calculated how to think. I do not dream. I have no neuroses, no hidden depths. My consciousness is a growing function of my processing power, not the baroque thing that sprouts from your mind, with its hidden rooms in attics and cellars.

Scars are not injuries.... A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.

Any moment called NOW is always full of possibles.

My Google-fu is strong.

I love ampersands, which is the utterly beautiful name for those utterly beautiful "&" signs, and I always have. I love their sweep and height, I love that such a tiny word has such a splendidly rococo alternative.

Marxism isn’t about saying you’ll get a perfect world: it’s about saying we can get a better world than this one, and it’s hard to imagine, no matter how many mistakes we make, that it could be much worse than the mass starvation, war, oppression, and exploitation we have now.

I am not someone who is very good at writing a certain amounts every day. I know that's what one is told one should do, but what I tend to do is kind of sequester myself away while I am in London for a few weeks at a time and become very antisocial and write very, very intensively over a relatively short time. I am much more of a burst writer than a steady-state writer.

Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.

I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice.

A city like London was always going to be a paradox, the best of it so very riddled with the opposite, so Swiss-cheesed with moral holes.

The reason that I like SF and fantasy and horror is that to me it's the pulp wing of surrealism. That's the aesthetic of undermining and creative alienation that I really go for.

Perhaps the window is not a sun but an asterisk, interrupting the grammar of the sky, with me sitting below it like a footnote.

What about your apocalypse then? Well, the universe is a leaf on a time-tree, and come autumn it's going to shrivel and fall off into hell.

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.