Statistically, you don't have much chance of becoming president if you're not tall and fairly handsome or at least conventional-looking.

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.

While films are a very visual and emotional artistic medium, video games take it one step further into the realm of a unique personal experience.

Simplicity design axiom: The complexity of the information appliance is that of the task, not the tool. The technology is invisible.

We are not here to enjoy the things on earth, but to pass them around. The people who do it are the happiest people you know!

To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois.

I do not consider Hitler to be as bad as he is depicted. He is showing an ability which is amazing and he seems to be gaining his victories without much bloodshed.

Amiability is the redeeming quality of fools.

Grandfather was well known for being stubborn in his ideas. For instance... you had to go to sleep facing east so that you would be ready to greet the sun when it returned.

I get outside a lot. I am a huge champion of physical activity. It's so important.

Sexuality and femininity is an accumulation of age and wisdom and comfort in your own skin.

You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.