Crash is an attempt to follow these trends off the edge of the graph paper to the point where they meet.

I loved that film.

When people are not quite certain about a meaning in my books I don't feel obliged to offer an exact explanation.

In Vasari's Lives one reads of Michelangelo sleeping for only four or five hours, painting all day at the age of eighty and then working through the night over his anatomy table with a candle strapped to his forehead.

AIDS seems to put a cap on it.

On the other hand, we may be swamped.

When the most famous lamb in history emerged into the world in 1996, she brought with her a host of ethical and scientific dilemmas.

Modern communications has usurped and hijacked everyday reality -- it gets between us and any kind of original response by imposing its own myths and fictions on us all.

There's a logic today that places a greater value on celebrity the less it is accompanied by actual achievement.

The stream of retinal images reaching the optic lobe is nothing more than a film strip.

The visual arts were able to break free and create the modern movements of the 20th century, but this has yet to happen in fiction.

I see his photographs as stills in some very elegant movie that might be playing in your local cineplex.

I don't believe in a fiction of nuance.

When rulers and generals urge on racial war, ordinary soldiers become their core selves, as vicious as the chimpanzee raiding parties who work themselves up with bloodcurdling screams and tear the enemy limb from limb.

You get a kind of moral tourism: "Today we will all go to Bangladesh and feel concerned for the poor who are starving to death there and perhaps we will give."

One of the twenty best films ever made.

Everything is for sale now -- even the human soul has a barcode.

Flats and houses are service stations, where people sleep and ablute.

At first it took one's breath away; it was quite unsettling.

Sooner or later all Science Fiction comes true.

Most of my ideas circle inside my head like old luggage.

What you and everyone else think of as the pornographic mind may well allow us to transcend ourselves and, in a sense, the limits of sex itself.

In The Crystal World I described a situation in which time doesn't exist at all.

Nothing is included which isn't going to entertain the audience, nothing that will distress or bore the audience or that the audience may find difficult.

Given the stability of the society we now live in, this is very difficult to convey.

It opened a vent of hell that took years to close and left me wary even of aspirin.

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

I suppose to isolate the truth of any situation as I see it and to try and create in my fiction the moral possibilities of any situation.

A real revolution, as 9-11 was in its way, will always come out of some unexpected corner of the sky.

Blue Velvet was, for me, the best film of the Eighties -- a surreal, voyeuristic and subversive masterpiece of cinema that has lost none of its power to startle, and still ensnares the audience into complicity with its masochistic weirdness.

I think that for me now the drained pool and abandoned hotel stand for psychological zero.

The whole entertainment world we inhabit is a tyranny of blandness.

We are seeing the last vestiges of a literary culture.

The Heathrow Hilton designed by Michael Manser is my favorite building in London.

Given the stability of the society we now live in, this is very difficult to convey.

All of my psychopaths are socially integrated.

Nothing is untrue.

Anybody who's been in the armed forces will tell you that most of the time you're doing nothing.

But, in a sense, you're also switching off the central nervous system that evolution provides us with.

There's a strange sort of rectilinear section of the sea, as if the brain had decided to slot it off.

Parked behind the Jaguar was a low-slung Japanese confection with huge wing mirrors, grotesque spoiler and air intakes large enough for a ramjet.

It takes a very large field of enterprise as its arena.

Pinned to the walls around him were a series of huge white-prints and architectural drawings, depicting various elevations of a fantastic Martian city he had once designed, its glass spires and curtain walls rising like heliotropic jewels from the vermilion desert.

Each of us is little more than the meagre residue of the infinite unrealized possibilities of our lives.

I spent many excited weekends dialling deserted offices all over London and dictating extraordinary sexual fantasies into their answering machines, to be typed out for amazed executives by the unsuspecting secretaries . . .

Nothing about sex ever shocks women.

On the one hand, a character is displayed on an enormous billboard as a figment in some vast Cinemascope epic.

Crossing frontiers is my profession.

Its hundreds of miles of gentrified stucco are an aching hangover from the 19th century that should have been bulldozed decades ago.

I detest postmodern architecture in any form whatsoever.