Alastair Reynolds

“Dreams of warp drives and hyperspace are just that - dreams.”

“If the Chinese are the first to the asteroids or the first to Mars, good for them, as far as I'm concerned.”

“I had an artistic streak and was good at painting and drawing and also very good at English, but I did want to be a scientist. The education system means you have to choose physics or Shakespeare. It can't be both.”

“Cyphel knew exactly how he felt about her as well — it was there in her expression whenever they spoke that beguiling combination of amusement and haughtiness that she carried off so well. It was a look that expressed disdain at Campion’s guarded advances but also a kind of measured probationary respect as well. It was a look that said You dare to think that I will find you as interesting as you obviously find me Well perhaps in that very act of daring you become interesting to me if only fleetingly.”

“My mother was a part of a reading group, but they would never come near science fiction because they think it's not for them.”

“You can't underestimate the importance of cover art.”

“I didn't have a huge amount of security when I was a scientist from one contract to another. You're always thinking, 'Am I going to have a job this time next year?'”

“As an SF writer, you've got the infinite toolkit of the writer at your disposal.”

“You have to be able to invest in your own creations, to suspend your own disbelief in order to be able to write them. We all have to draw the line somewhere.”

“It's a novel experience to have one of my books read by a reading group.”

“Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid. In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to BE a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the *whole damned universe*!”

“It is always better to try and fail than not to try.”

“I am playing in a playground that's already been played in. I am always aware that a lot of the furniture in science fiction is second hand.”

“It's true that my stories seem to deal with the end of the world. I've often been called the high priest of gothic miserablism, which is slightly unfair.”

“You're confident he'll have found him, then?""Well, no. I didn't sat that.""If there's one thing I hate," Volyova said, looking coldly at the other Triumvir, "it's mindless optimism.”

“If you do a certain amount of work every day, it will eventually become a novel.”

“Science fiction can be very relevant, could be good literature.”

“It's called optimism — but I’m losing the hang of it fast.”

“I've never had much interest in spinoffery - the idea of writing in someone else's universe generally leaves me cold - but 'Doctor Who' is different. I've grown up with it. It's been part of my life since I was tiny, watching Jon Pertwee on a grainy black and white television in Cornwall and being terrified out of my mind.”

“It's not healthy to obsess over every data point, every review or reader comment. I think the first few times you see someone writing about you, you have this massive emotional response to it. But after a while, it all just fades into the background noise.”