I don't have a day job, so I read any time of day.

You couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate at least something. Indeed, perhaps you couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate almost everything.

I hate going back over what I've written. It makes me feel physically sick.

If I want to feel as if I'm being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.

I'm reasonably good at talking onstage, but actually holding court in a pub is all to do with power dynamics which I don't think has anything to do with fiction.

There's never a bad time to put earplugs in. They're the kind of thing you can reject as a bit lame, but somebody told me to do start wearing earplugs and it turned out to be great advice.

Plot is tremendously important to me: I can't stand books where nothing happens, and I can't imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder.

The simile has to match the tone of its surroundings and has to be like a little joke. Writing a simile that isn't funny on some level is quite hard.

I'm very finicky about when I'm in the right mood to write. So most days, I find some excuse not to do anything.

The reason I start a novel is because there's something that excites me and I want to explore it.

I read 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford again every so often.

Do all the good you can while you still have the opportunity.

I meet people in my daily life, people who seem to experience some change and some growth on a personal level, and that gives me hope.

It's good to trust others but, not to do so is much better.

Young men make great mistakes in life; for one thing, they idealize love too much.

We asked for God's help; and now, in this shining outcome, in this magnificent triumph of good over evil, we should thank God.

To a lot of people, angels are a matter of faith.

I have a stab wound on my left hip and one on my thigh and a slash mark across my right calf. I have a bottle stab wound on my left calf.

Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.

Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.

A man in all the world's new fashion planted, That hath a mint of phrases in his brain.