“My own great-grandfather, who said simply enough, "No wicked man could write such a book as this; and no good man would write it unless it were true and he were commanded of God to do so.”

“No wicked man could write such a book as this; and no good man would write it, unless it were true and he were commanded of God to do so. ”

“I sat on the bench by the willows and at my honey bun and read Triton. There are some awful things in the world, it’s true, but there are also some great books. When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a bench on a day that isn’t all that warm and they could sit reading it and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside their own head. I’d like to write like Delany or Heinlein or Le Guin.”

“Plenty of people were writing novels; in fact, if one did a survey in the street, half of Edinburgh was writing a novel, and this meant that there really weren't enough characters to go round. Unless, of course, one wrote about people who were themselves writing novels. And what would the novels that these fictional characters were writing be about? Well, they would be novels about people writing novels.”

“How good a book is should be judged by the man who writes it by the excellence of the material that he eliminates.”

“The real moon,if you could reach it and survive it, would in a deep and deadly sense be just like anywhere else...no man would find an abiding strangness on the moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden.”