“I just took [my cancer diagnosis] as bad luck, basically. It did strike me almost immediately, my atheist sort of thing kicked in and I thought "ha, if I was a God-botherer, I'd be thinking, why me...”

“The one on the left," Worthil said, "is a male, carrying the testes and penis. The middle one is equipped with a kind of reversible vagina, and ovaries. The vagina turns inside-out to implant the f...”

“The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.”

“A temple was worth a dozen barracks; a militia man carrying a gun could control a small unarmed crowd only for as long as he was present; however, a single priest could put a policeman inside the h...”

“...a guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybodys either for it or against it, were against it. You would be too, if you thought about it. The very way...”

“What, anyway, was he to say? That intelligence could surpass and excel the blind force of evolution, with its emphasis on mutation, struggle and death? That conscious cooperation was more efficient...”

“There were days when I still put on make up in case youd come back,but I wear the same clothes and shower in the rainand eat when I can and sleep when I can,which is rare and not often,so if youd s...”

“When the others were picked up and walked home by friends or fathers or best friends sisters,I was the kid in a grey hoodie, walking with the poets, the singers, the thinkers, and I was not alone.”

“My home will never be a place, but a state of mind, which I find through my music.”

“We have grace of strength to work, to clear our cities of any dirt.”

“Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity. W...”

“Having spent a long time in open spaces, whether sea or desert, it is a luxury to be able to take refuge in towns with narrow streets which provide a fragile fortress against the assaults of the in...”

“It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these ...”