I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction but in a very general way as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet but soon will and will change everything for everybody and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible never the impossible.

I think that narrative fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater art history architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema like cinema verite is film in its purest form.

And Shanghai is amazing. I'm a fan of science fiction so when you're there in the night with all the lights and all this modernity it's like a set in a movie.

Science fiction is an amazing literature: plot elements that you would think would be completely worn out by now keep changing into surprising new forms.

In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people but we're now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman J. K. Rowling Lemony Snicket are only three of the best known among a good number of equals.

I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.