Richard K. Morgan

“The difference between virtuality and life is very simple. In a construct you know everything is being run by an all-powerful machine.Reality doesn't offer this assurance, so it's very easy to develop the mistaken impression that you're in control.Quellcrest FalconerEthics on the Precipice”

“I came quite late to gaming: I didn't start playing until 2002.”

“Everyone's afraid of what they don't understand," Ringil said quietly.”

“For me, any fiction of nobles and swords necessarily has to be a story of corruption, injustice and savagely violent conflict - because any other treatment is going to have all the heft and realistic honesty of a bedtime fairy tale for five year olds.”

“The only problem they had ... was in drawing the fine differences between war-mass murder of people wearing a uniform not your own; justifiable loss-mass murder of your own troops, but with substantial gains; and criminal negligence-mass murder of your own troops, without appreciable benefit.”

“Strong, smart, self-reliant women who don't need men to define them only crop up in the human myth-base in one guise - the Wicked Witch.”

“Pretty much anything you care to imagine can happen in a fantasy, which in turn means you can really crank up the intensity of the tale you're telling.”

“I think more talented writers should get involved in the industry, yes, of course. But that doesn't presuppose that those writers have to be novelists or screenwriters.”

“I'd always had a hankering to write some old-school sword and sorcery. And there certainly are advantages to that particular form - for one thing, you're able to go all-out on the imaginative front, with a lot less concern for the usual unities of time and space and character.”

“As to the differences between game work and novel writing, well, obviously the former is a lot less lonely - you're in and out of meetings all the time, bouncing stuff back and forth with the level designers, the art department, the animation team, so forth.”

“The myth of Good Guys and Bad Guys is one of the most pervasive we own, and morally grey anti-heroes are simply one of modern fiction's attempts to shake off that mythology and replace it with something a bit more honest.”

“I've been accused countless times of writing gloomy futures. But to me, the texture of my sci-fi just feels like an extrapolation of current trends.”

“There's a lot of young authors out there, and people do seem to forget: in order to write well, you do need to have some experience.”

“I've come to regard the superior end of HBO drama as, above all, novelistic.”

“Like Bancroft, MacIntyre had been a man of power, and like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing. Someone else was paying.”

“Potential, and the will to deploy it. That's all magic is in the end, you know.”

“Good authors mature over time: it does take awhile.”

“Evolutionary theory informs our understanding of some frankly inexcusable social behavior and renders it perfectly normal.”

“Certainly a decade and a half out in the real world, bashing my head against things, probably made me into a more textured writer. It gives you something to write about.”

“Most women I've ever met either already have or at some point want kids, but there are still significant numbers who don't, or at least don't right now. But those variations are beside the point - the real point is that among all those women, having or wanting kids or not, I never met a single one who didn't want the choice.”