I've never really understood that whole thing of writers avoiding other writers' novels while they're working on their own.

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

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.

Books are to me as homemade tattoos are to an inmate. Can't get enough of them.

Whatever distinguishes one lump of flesh from another when we're alive, we're all the same once we're dead. Just used-up shells.

No matter their party, people with a conflict of interest should be banned from the Electoral College.

Meditation is mind’s vacation!

You may not understand what all's happening in your life right now, but any possible explanation pales in comparison to what you do know because of your faith in God's goodness and assurance.

Carlyle uttered a pregnant truth when he said that the history of any country is in the biographies of the men who made it.

I see myself as a hip-hop artist, but I never wanted to make music for a specifically white audience. Thats not what I grew up around.

Being sorry won't get you into heaven. Get happy, son. Get that old spring into your step and stay on your toes.

I cannot live without children.

If more people were stoned there would be less violence in the world.