Richard K. Morgan

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 seen 'True Detective' end-to-end at least three times; I'll probably see it again. It is a work of dark brilliance. But if the phone goes fifteen minutes from the end of that last episode, I'll likely turn it off and go make coffee when I'm done with the call.

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

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.

For me, some of the most intense creativity comes when something has to change for technical or design reasons, and you're trying to find a way to make it fit the fiction.

With a game, you're only one part of a team, and what emerges at launch is very much the culmination of the whole team's efforts. You can be proud of playing your part, but it doesn't ever belong to you.

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.

I think noir is an immensely powerful - and elastic - lens through which to look at narrative and character. It seems to access something dark and true in us that other modes of fiction are often a bit prissy about touching. But the key to making it work as time and culture moves on is to use the elasticity, not just the power.

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.

I remember visits to the local libraries and getting my own library cards as things of rite-of-passage significance.

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 guess if I was made responsible for every single line of dialogue in a game and every single piece of textual visual detail, every sign or piece of graffiti, then yes, I think that would be comparable to the time and effort required to write a very long novel, indeed.

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

A typical twenty-page short story would work quite well as a graphic novel. A single graphic novel of maybe 120 pages would condense down into a short story quite nicely.

Good authors mature over time: it does take awhile.

Good authors mature over time: it does take awhile. Travel abroad and learn to live in other cultures. That's one of the things about teaching abroad.

I think certainly if I'd started getting published when I was in my early twenties, I was quite sheltered then and didn't know anything much about the world. I hadn't had any direct experience of how the world works.

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.

I think by definition you need to have lived a little bit to write anything that's humanly true.

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'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.

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.

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

Science casts a long black shadow back over who we think we are, and where it falls the temperature falls with it. Its touch is chilly and unforgiving.

'Syndicate' is technically the first game I worked on.