I guess, when I left university, I liked the idea of being a writer, and I thought then that being a writer really meant that you were a novelist. But if one of the impulses for being a novelist is wanting to be a storyteller, I never had any urge to tell stories.

We had a certain kind of really big prestige among, I suppose not just intellectual folk, but a sort of nice middle class intelligent folk of a very urban nature.

I'll tell you who I absolutely adore: Ian McEwan.

The movies sort of tell you what they want to be as you're writing them.

I take four planes a week, honestly. You know, I am for intelligence screening.

I think there's all kinds of life out there, including intelligent life, but the reason we haven't found each other is because of vast distances.

I am definitely not as polite as Beatrice, I have to say. I tell it as it is. I am shyer at first.

At university, I used to cheat and use precooked meals and then tell my friends that I've cooked it. They thought I had skills!

Never ask anyone over 70 how they feel. They'll tell you.

There's an intelligent redneck in all of us somewhere.

Man becomes man only by his intelligence, but he is man only by his heart.

I'm the kind of guy who, if you tell me you can't do something, like, 'Brian, you can't do a backflip off that two-floor building,' and I'm going to give it a shot.

You have to think about storytelling over the long haul: what is going to engage an audience for, potentially, years and how characters can become deeply involving for an audience.

Artificial intelligence is here and being rapidly commercialized, with new applications being created not just for manufacturing but also for energy, healthcare, and oil and gas. This will change how we all do business.

We tend to see individual differences instead of human universals. Thus, when someone says the word 'intelligence,' we think of Einstein instead of humans.

Our intentions may be very good, but, because the intelligence is limited, the action may turn out to be a mistake - a mistake, but not necessarily a sin, for sin comes out of a wrong intention.

I trust every lead in every department. All of the teams are phenomenal artists. All I need to tell them is why to do something, not how to do something.

There is a certain panic, at least if you're raised Mormon, to being single at 31. But what they don't tell you is that it can also be kinda great.

When I pick up the guitar, it's a melody, and that's what drives the lyrics. It's bits and pieces of truth, but it is storytelling.

The popular dystopian vision of AI is wrong for one simple reason: it equates intelligence with autonomy. That is, it assumes a smart computer will create its own goals and have its own will and will use its faster processing abilities and deep databases to beat humans at their own game.