Lunatics are writers whose works write them, Bat." "Not all lunatics are writers, Mrs. Rey-believe me." "But most writers are lunatics, Bat-believe me. The human world is made up of stories, not people.
Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realize they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners.
Neither of us had anything to say, or rather we had everything to say, but after all those nights of not saying a word, we suddenly found we had not one dollar of time left between us.
Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.
Have you noticed," said John, "how countries call theirs 'sovereign nuclear deterrents,' but call the other countries' ones 'weapons of mass destruction'?
I added 'writers' to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up.
Books’ll be back,” Esther-in-Unalaq predicts. “Wait till the power grids start failing in the 2030s and the datavats get erased. It’s not far away. The future looks a lot like the past.
Books tended not to switch their stories whenever it suited them.
...books may speak, but they do not listen.
Not a clue – and, no, I don’t touch drugs. The world’s unstable enough without scrambling your brain for kicks.
I think about pinball, and how being a kid’s like being shot up the firing lane and there’s no veering left or right; you’re just sort of propelled. But once you clear the top, like when you’re sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen, suddenly there�...
Rootlessness," I opine, "is the twenty-first century norm." "You're not wrong and that's why we're in the shit we're in, mate. If you belong nowhere, why give a tinker's toss about anywhere?
Empires die, like all of us dancers in the strobe-lit dark.
You only value something if you know it’ll end.
Such narrative arcs make good movies but shitty existences.
Men marry women hoping they'll never change. Women marry men hoping they will.
A book can’t be a half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant
Nonfiction that smells like fiction is neither.
If poor doomed Olly’s a Radio 4 play, what am I?”” “You, Hugo,” she kisses my earlobe, “are a sordid, low-budget French film. The sort you’d stumble across on TV at night. You know you’ll regret it in the morning, but you keep watchin...
The Future,” says Ian, in a film-trailer voice. “Coming soon, to a Present near you.
Here’s the truth: Who is spared love is spared grief.
