The Martians are always coming.

I used to dig in the garden, and there isn't anything fantastic or ultradimensional about crab grass... unless you are a SF writer, in which case, pretty soon you're viewing crabgrass with suspicion. What are its real motives? And who sent it in the first place? The question I always found myself asking was, 'What is it, really?'

The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three dimensional and not in space or time.

I dreamed: I am the fish whose flesh is eaten, and because I am fat, it is good.

I am not a food critic. Or a chef. Or even a professional writer. What I am schooled in the art of, however, is enjoying myself.

All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like, as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it's another world. It's filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers - all kinds of people.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

People don't really know themselves until they're 30. Like most people nowadays, I went to university, got a degree and wandered for a bit. I trained to be a chartered accountant, which I didn't much enjoy, and it was only slowly that the idea of becoming a creative writer gelled.