My mum was a librarian, and she brought home a lot of interesting books, and we just read and read. I suppose I didn't really think I could be a writer myself until I was working in editing in my 20s and discovered that actually, the books that came in were not very much like published books.

How on earth do people imagine we equip children for life if we never show them the sorts of issues other people encounter, if we never talk through with them how they might deal with difficulty or violence or unexpected shocks and surprises?

There's this assumption that all children have the luxury of a childhood where their innocence is always respected and their main occupation is pleasant play - at the age of 18 or 21, they are then thrust into the real world and shown its uglier side, but not before.

It's useful to think of the imagination as an aspect of the body because it seems to have processes of its own that are obscure to us.

If my strength is technology, financial structuring is my son's skill.

To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas and that they're trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore's Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks!

You can't gaze in the crystal ball and see the future. What the Internet is going to be in the future is what society makes it.

It's much easier for people to compare wages or identify bad employers or discuss bad labor practices in the Internet economy than it was in, say, a factory environment, where that stuff wasn't usually published or available.