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.

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.

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.

This you have to understand. There's only one way to hurt a man who's lost everything. Give him back something broken.

My future's about trying to be a better man.

Do something: You can always correct something but you can never correct nothing.

In our hurried world too little value is attached to the part of the connoisseur and dilettante.

The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself.

We continue to love in spite of the pain, tears & heartbreak. Perhaps the pain makes us stronger, the tear makes us braver & the heartbreak makes us wiser.

The goals of the feminist movement have not been achieved, and those who claim we're living in a post-feminist era are either sadly mistaken or tired of thinking about the whole subject.

In the distant future, I don't want to be remembered; I want to remember!

A lot of people wrote that Roger (Maris) and I didn't like each other and that we didn't get along. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As an actor, I need to get excited about something that I can actually relate to.