Some people didn't like the novel, it is in some ways extremely bleak. But if you are dealing with the kind of subjects I am — trying to demystify the delusions we have about ourselves, to get a more accurate fix on human nature — then people are unsettled. And the easiest way to deal with that is to say it's weird or it's cold.

On his novel Crash, as quoted in "The benign catastrophist" by Susie Mackenzie in The Guardian (6 September 2003).