Pessimistic visions about almost anything always strike the public as more erudite than optimistic ones
London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness.
Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.
I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.
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.
My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give.
I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction.
Training is practice doing a new task much more slowly than an expert would do it.
Martin [Luther King] wasn't one to buck forces too much.
Mr. Breschnev says we will bury you, I don't subscribe to that point of view. It seems like such an ignorant thing to do, if the Russians love their children, too.
We simply need to believe in the power that's within us, and use it.