We simply don't need so many men today.

It's a pity that his association with drugs and homosexuality has made him a counterculture figure, but I suppose his real links are with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and the Beats.

Crash is a clear case of that; so is Atrocity Exhibition.

Her hips pressed against the BMW, and the curvature of its door deflected the lines of her thigh, as if the car was a huge orthopaedic device that expressed a voluptuous mix of geometry and desire.

There should be more of them, at least one in every borough, and London would become a surrealist and poetic city.

As a result of, many younger writers and filmmakers are now simply expressing their own obsessions; that is all that is left that they feel they can say something truthful about.

The American Army?

What's so sad about most people's lives, my own included, is that they accept the roles that are given them.

Very few in the case of Surrealism, but not many more in the case of Science Fiction.

My mother tipsily climbed the miniature stairs, listening to my father declaim the postman's naive verses in his resonant baritone.

More and more of what used to be regarded as aberrant or perverse activity is now accepted as more or less conventional behaviour.

I conceive of certain possibilities and extend them through an act of imagination.

Bourgeois life is crushing the imagination from this planet.

You tell yourself these tales of gold to sustain yourself, to inspire this one-man team.

Dark Star is the Catch-22 of outer space.

Lists are fascinating; one could almost do a list novel.

During the night the swimming-pool had drained itself.

Schools of architecture and design like Art Deco and the Modernist movement were engines running forward into the future.

An institutionalized paranoia seems a bleak future for the human race.

People will soon be living only in the present and will not be interested in the future at all.

It's a good thing he established his reputation in the late 1960s when people were still prepared to make a bit of an effort . . . I think critical judgments were sharper then.

He describes the fate of the isolated man who is surrounded by a vast and impenetrable bureaucracy, and begins to accept himself on the terms the bureaucracy imposes.

Before the Iraq War, my feeling was one of great anxiety.

I think there's something about the automobile crash that taps all kinds of barely recognized impulses in people's minds and imaginations.

The media landscape had sealed a Technicolor umbrella around the planet, and then redefined reality as itself.

And, of course, many of my characters are wilting under the pressure; they don't want to buy any more refrigerators or electric toothbrushes . . . They want to find some truth about themselves.

I suppose there just hasn't been room for political statements in my fiction.

Strange little obsessions become huge lava flows and threaten to smother common sense.

But they call it entertainment.

A remarkable percentage of Science Fiction stories and novels in those days were concerned with the here and now.

Francis Bacon is, for me, the greatest British painter of the last century, unflinching in the way he returned the Gorgon's stare.

I suppose World War II was the last fling, but since then aviation is just Skytrain, which lacks any sort of imaginative dimension whatever.

In a real sense, my novels write me.

How has technology changed our lives?

Its people needed to break out, to invent the hatred that could liberate them, and they found an Austrian misfit only too happy to do the job.

They can pretend they're someone else.

Just as all women are pretty, at heart all wines are good, though some are very much better.

The most perfect crime of all: when the victims are either willing, or aren't aware that they are victims.

The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age.

The TV series was a pale imitation, fatally damaged by the talkshow presenter.

Many hundreds of perfect short stories have been written -- perfect in the sense that a good carpenter can construct a perfectly-made table.

When the first female Darwin or Freud appears it will have an astonishingly liberating force, and could change the world in an almost religious way.

The past became little more than an attic of old trunks to be rummaged through for the latest nostalgia fad.

The technological medium of cinema creates the communication level by which something like the De Niro character in Taxi Driver becomes a hero.

At least five or six had to die, to make the kind of splash that would reach the evening news and stay there.

We may see a new religious leader appearing, who'll unite the Green movement and all these New Age movements.

The story of the children on the island was framed by a larger story involving a massive air battle.

I think we're living at a transfer point, where we're moving from one economy of the imagination and the body to a future economy of the imagination and the body.

My stories were written in snatched minutes, snatched half hours here and there, scribbled on the backs of envelopes . . . it was all done in a kind of spur-of-the-moment, knocked-out-rapidly fashion.

A major advertising campaign for a new kind of motorcar, hair-spray or washing powder may be the only kind of reality we have now.