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.

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.

Originality is a concept possible only to a limited viewpoint.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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