Stress is when you're 29 years old, playing for Rochdale, with an expiring contract and a mortgage to pay.

I’ve always thought a novelist only has one character and that is himself or herself.

What a writer brings to any story is an attitude

The narrative was too constricted; it was like a fetus strangling on its own umbilical cord.

Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.

Violence is the way stupid people try to level the playing field.

The world is divided up into two kinds of people - those who look at their body waste in the toilet bowl, and those who don't.

I started all over again on page 1, circling the 262 pages like a vulture looking for live flesh to scavenge.

The professional guts a book through - in full knowledge that what he is doing is not very good. Not to work is to exhibit a failure of nerve.

Wit is the most dangerous talent you can possess. It must be guarded with great discretion and good-nature, otherwise it will create you many enemies.

There are two types of people ... the scrutinizers and the scrutinized

Friendship is a weird sort of thing when you think about it.

The optimistic nature finds joy in the very feeling for life

I live in an ecotone. Employment must coexist with goofing off. Responsibility must coexist with irresponsibility.

What matters right now is this: we're each of us standing here, together, alive, together.

You can love your job, but your job will not love you back.

but you were a fool to bring that pider into this house

The more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be.

For excellence, the presence of others is always required.

Reputation should be neither sought nor avoided.

Man is the apex of the only world we can ever know.