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.

Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.

Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot.

Mr Blawke always reminded me of a heron; I'm not sure why. Something to do with a sense of rapacious stillness, perhaps, and also the aura of one who knows time is on his side.

There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.

Torture is such a slippery slope; as soon as you allow a society or any legal system to do that, almost instantly you get a situation where people are being tortured for very trivial reasons.

My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.

I remember being shocked when I discovered some of my school pals didn't have books in their homes. I thought it was like not having oxygen, or hot water.

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've always loved Scotland, and I'm not a huge fan of big cities, to be honest. I like them to dip into for a bit, but I'm not sure I would want to live in one again.

In theory, I work an eight-hour day and a five-day week which means I can socialise with my pals who mostly have normal jobs like teaching and computer programming.

He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

I like to write songs about what's happening, what I see around me and what I hear. Everyday life. Someone may be talking to me and I may take it from that.

South Carolina is in the spring a paradise, in the summer a hell, and in the autumn a hospital.

Without grace no book can live, and with it the poorest may have its life prolonged.

If all were perfect Christians, individuals would do their duty; the people would be obedient to the laws, the magistrates incorrupt, and there would be neither vanity nor luxury in such a state.

The beauty of life is, therefore, geometrical beauty of a type that Plato would have much appreciated.

Affirmations don't make something happen; they make something welcome.

If you can get through the first round you have a good chance of getting into the next one.

Football is something like war. Whoever behaves too properly, is lost.

My acting career helped pull me through the rough times.