Any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated.
The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides.
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.
You get so caught up in what you’re writing – action sequences tend to do that more than anything else because you’re living it, and feeling for your characters.
Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.
Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!
Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.
What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn’t lead to wisdom? And what’s wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?
Perdition awaits at the end of a road constructed entirely from good intentions, the devil emerges from the details and hell abides in the small print.
Escape is a consumer goods like another.
I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.
An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.
People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it is. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped.
I’m not a great believer in awards-of course the fact that I’ve never won one has nothing to do with it at all!
Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries.
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
Experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.
I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.
If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!
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.