Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Knowledge is not just power - it is control.
I love you forever. I am sorry I cannot love you now.
I am an avid reader of comics, though I came to them late.
That's what you get for ignoring the beauty of Tupperware.
My reading of history is that we continually inherit trouble.
I have known heaven, and now I am in hell, and there are mimes.
The great thing is to have been surrounded by stories all my life.
Ninjas are silly. They are the flower fairies of gong fu and karate.
In a lot of places, of course, the '80s had never really come to an end.
Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.
The end doesn't justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means.
The notion of our leaders as patrician ascetics of unassailable virtue is risible.
If we one day cease to exist, what will be remarkable is that we were ever here at all.
Digitisation was supposed to lead to a great democratisation of access to creative work.
'Tigerman' was born in the front seat of a Hilux SUV on the road north out of Chiang Mai.
The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology.
Names aren't just coathooks, they're coats. They're the first thing anyone knows about you.
Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player.
The tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.
I'm fascinated by human agency - by the process of decision, both in the individual and the mass.
Law is error, you see. It's an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.
The trouble with shooting people, Edie Banister now remembers, is that it's so hard to do just one.
Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method.
Prize lists are out, and you're not on them? Nature of the world - means nothing. Prizes are a lottery.
The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.
I'm a white, middle-aged, married, middle-class male with kids. I couldn't be disenfranchised if I tried.
Whether you're choosing for yourself or for a character - or for a child - names have baggage of their own.
I used desperately to want to be a brooding hero from literature, but I'm optimistic, healthy and fair-haired.
Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature.
Happiness is boundlessly weird. Other people's choices often seem to delight them, where I would run screaming.
Never mind, never mind, let's get to the part where we smite the unrighteous. I've brought my most alarming teeth!
I think the reason I wrote screenplays for nearly a decade was because it was my territory. I could stake that out.
Suddenly, the idea of writing a book was like coming home. I didn't tell anyone except my wife, Clare. I just began.
I grew up on the Roger Moore and Sean Connery Bond movies, so the DNA of my spies is extremely ridiculous and goofy.
I work in our living room, a strange room in a strange, topsy-turvy house. I work underneath this enormous bookshelf.
My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler.
I know that when I talk to my parents and my friends, there's a strong feeling of the world out of control and damaged.
If you ask who I aspire to, well, if a single line of mine was as funny as P. G. Wodehouse can be, that would be great.
Nowhere have I ever heard of Satan taking the form of an avuncular hippie. No doubt he could. It just seems inefficient.
Performance is hard. I know this. I really enjoy it, but I have bombed, I have fluffed, and I have said the wrong thing.
We need to create the institutions that will support the society we want to live in. The only answer is collective action.
Yes, you are under surveillance. Yes, it is odious. Yes, it should bother you. And yes, it's hard to know how to avoid it.
An enormous amount of a writer's life is performance. I find myself wondering, at the moment, whether I do too much of it.
I want a politics that doesn't need to pretend to be holy or perfect or infallible. I want a politics that gets on with it.
I'm usually reading too many books - in fact, I'm usually reading enough books that if the stack fell on me, I'd be injured.
Professional politicians will say anything, and they're always careful to leave themselves room to turn around and do the other.
Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century.
I don't do a lot of research, exactly, but I'm constantly wandering through the world finding things incredible and remembering them.
The Internet has the capacity to extend to us genuine choice, and that is not without risk. Real power does entail real responsibility.
It's not that any sufficiently advanced technology is magic, it's that any technology taking place beyond the threshold of our senses is.