“I didn’t want to write SF about people who Sold The Moon or were the big Earth-shattering Newtons-Pasteurs-Einsteins-Hawkings of the future. I wasn’t interested in the people who shaped the future. I was more interested in people who were shaped by the future. People who were products of their environment.”

“The conservatives could sneer about "social engineering" if they wanted, but I thought that most people believed as I did that government should embody our best hopes and lend a hand to people who were struggling.”

“A university is not about results in the next quarter; it is not even about who a student has become by graduation. It is about learning that molds a lifetime, learning that transmits the heritage of millennia; learning that shapes the future”

“If you’re honest with yourself as a writer, trying to tell the best story you can, your story will be an honest one. And your values will come out, no matter how hard you try to disguise them.”

“While I wasn't certain how I felt about spiritualists, I was certain enough about the type of people who were drawn to them. Only people unhappy in the present seek to know the future.”

“She liked things that had been written by people who had lived short, ugly, and tragic lives. Or, who at least, were English.”

“quoting from Neil Kinnock, running against Thatcher in 1987:Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Is it because all our predecessors were thick? Did they lack talent? Those people who could sing, and play, and recite, and write poetry, those people who could make wonderful things with their hands? Those people who could dream dreams, see visions? Why didn't they get it? Was it because they were weak? Those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football? Weak? Those women who could survive eleven childbearings? Were they weak? Anybody really think that they didn't get what we have because they didn't have the talent, or the strength, or the endurance, or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform on which they could stand.”