Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal.….

I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on..

One of the advantages of having laws is the pleasure one may take in breaking them..

Smell is a very animal thing, almost reptilian, where the more cerebral things like reading less so..

Any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with p….

There is a quite a lot of effort involved but I find action sequences some of the quickest to write and the most fun..

They speak very well of you". - "They speak very well of everybody." - "That so bad?" - "Yes. It means you can´t trust them..

What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn't lead to wisdom? And what's wisdom but knowing what is right, an….

"Don't you have a religion?" Dorolow asked Horza. "Yes," he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main m….

I am not being obtuse. You are being paranoid..

I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters..

I don't really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out th….

What's one more meaningless act of violence on that zoo of a planet? It would be appropriate. When in Rome; burn it..

The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides..

After doing extensive research, I can definitely tell you that single malt whiskies are good to drink..

You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history.

One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve..

Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy..

Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what's been done, what's been superseded, what's so much part of the furniture it's practicall….

In so much of politics you're not allowed to disagree with what's been agreed..

I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness..