And every friend I've got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I'd never catch up.

I love superconductors.

I don't have a strong interest in history.

I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.

I do not believe they've run out of surprises.

But... watching Steven Barnes taught me to treat my life like an art form.

Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen.

Bruce Sterling is one terrific writer and he's relatively new, but I don't know how long he's been doing it; he probably doesn't need the publicity anymore!

I never got good at predicting what millions of people will suddenly decide is rational.

The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.

As for AIDS, it's a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it's a quarter; after that it's a childhood disease.

In hindsight it may even seem inevitable that a socialist society will starve when it runs out of capitalists.

My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names.

I'd repair our education system or replace it with something that works.

We need to take command of the solar system to gain that wealth, and to escape the sea of paper our government is becoming, and for some decent chance of stopping a Dinosaur Killer asteroid.