“And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear, and superstition. By the year 2050, when the conflict began, the world had fallen upon fearful, superstitious times.”

I write with teenagers in mind.

In the end, living is defined by dying. Book-ended by oblivion, we are caught in the vice of terror, squeezed to bursting by the approaching end. Fear is ever-present, waiting to be called to the surface. Change brought fear, and fear brought destruction.

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism.

I try not to be surprised. Surprise is the public face of a mind that has been closed.

Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; its a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.

Consciousness is the feel of accessing memory.

The more the media peddled fear, the more the people lost the ability to believe in one another. For every new ill that befell them, the media created an explanation, and the explanation always had a face and a name.

Are you saying a society wracked by plague is preferable to one wracked by indifference?

I cannot choose to ignore this feeling, of life slowly bleeding out of me. I cannot ignore the fact that life only makes sense to me when I see a smile, or feel another hand in mine.

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence.

The mind is not a machine, it is an idea. And the Idea resists all attempts to control it.

… from our vantage point it is now clear that the only thing the population had to fear was fear itself.

In the end, living is defined by dying.

Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect.

Our world is limited by the machinery we carry. Its very different to the 18th and 19th century Enlightenment scientists who were mostly men of God and thought it was their quest to uncover Gods great plan.

I cant see any great evidence that humans have any ability to access anything other than the material world. Beyond that, who knows, but theres no good evidence that would take me to any particular belief.

All this time i’ve hated myself for it. I thought i’d given it up for nothing. But if i hadn’t fallen, i wouldn’t have met you.

But if i hadn’t fallen, i wouldn’t have met you.

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you’ve fallen into good hands – someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

I love technology – yes, I have fallen in love with older cars, but I’m all for new technology.

In the U.S., we really have fallen short of road-racing facilities that have kept up with the times, unfortunately, but it’s a fact.

If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.

Advances have fallen, generally, for everything except the biggest potential bestsellers.

The art of the novel, however, has fallen into such a state of stagnation – a lassitude acknowledged and discussed by the whole of critical opinion – that it is hard to imagine such an art can survive for long without some radical change.