So I wrote what I hoped would be science fiction, I was not at all sure if what I wrote would be acceptable even. But I don't say that I consciously wrote with humour. Humour is a part of you that comes out.

I do think that short story writing is often a matter of luck.

I like to think that I have no single view nor any single situation that I think things arrive from. I try to give examples of what I think are interesting questions for me.

I'm quite influenced in this by one of my heroes, Montaigne, who thought a man's real task was to render as honest an account of himself as he could.

The British audience was very important to me. I have always looked away from American to non-American audiences and so this was important.

The absurdist stuff wasn't terribly popular at the time I was doing it.

Originality is a concept possible only to a limited viewpoint.

I've always thought of absurdism as a French fad I'd like to belong to.

I have never been a critic of science fiction as a whole.

But science perhaps is very difficult without faith. Also there is no simple way of saying now we have science, we don't need faith anymore.

I think it can be quite impossible to think well of yourself, so I prefer not to think about that too much. But I am very pleased, obviously.

I would like to do a novel where some curse turns that into how the world really is - a blessing or a curse, I don't know which.

Wherever you go in the galaxy, you can find a food business, a house-building business, a war business, a peace business, a governing business, and so forth. And, of course, a God business, which is called 'religion,' and which is a particularly reprehensible line of endeavor.

I'm not so interested any more in how a great deal of science fiction goes. It goes into things like Star Wars and Star Trek which all go excellent in their own way.

I sell well now in Russia. I remember one signing in Russia some years ago where the bookstore had two strongmen to hold the crowds back.