All the things that made us basically nasty, rapacious, competitive as a species are not necessarily hard-coded into whatever passes for the DNA of artificial intelligence.

I'm a fiction writer, and fiction is telling the lives of unreal people. But the only way you can learn to do that well is by really understanding the lives of real people.

It's possible that there is a guiding intelligence in our universe. I don't see a lot of personal evidence for an interventionist-on-an-individual-basis-deity. I have friends who very much do believe in that. But I don't.

Science fiction has never been about the future; it's always been about the present day whether it's Victorian England that Wells was writing about or the post-9/11 era that I'm writing about.

Whereas in the past people have seen the two sexes as almost incomprehensibly different, now there is a group of people that are explaining the connections between both the genders, literally in the way their biology informs some of their expression.

Sometimes we fall in love with somebody who will probably never love us, for reasons having nothing to do with us but with their own mindset, their chemistry.

I did grow up with a really big interest in math and science; I liked it.

Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.