There are probably a couple of things I'd never write about until everyone I know is dead. And then there's other stuff which nobody would want to read a book about anyway.

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.

Sometimes you weren't supposed to share pain. Sometimes it was best just to deal with it alone.

Catholics are frequently criticised because of the prominence and respect given to the Virgin Mary while simultaneously condemned for not giving enough prominence and respect to women.

It takes a little crazy to make a difference.

Stress itself is not what’s toxic. It’s our relationship to it that's the hazard.

Behavior is the outcome of the battle among internal systems.

Good newes may bee told at any time, but ill in the morning.

'Fringe' is one of my favorite television shows, from its inception. I absolutely love all of the science fiction of it, the mystery of it, and the science in it.

We shall never be at peace with ourselves until we yield with glad supremacy to our higher faculties.

It doesn’t matter what I do. People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.

On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.