When I'm writing new material, I never have any trouble coming up with ideas.

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.

God can save all souls.

His smile was bright and sweet and hot enough to melt solid steel. "Is this the part where I kiss you?""If you like.""Oh, " he said, "I like.

The pressures are intense, because the rewards for success and the penalty for failure are more and more.

As a god self-slain on his own strange altar, Death lies dead.

It is a novel kind of supremacy, the best that life can offer, to have as servants by skill those who by nature are our masters.

You’re attacking that one like a wolverine.

The most realistic blood I've seen is when Marlon Brando gets beat up in On The Waterfront.

What I tell everyone, and I really do for myself is, I have a long-run dream, which is I want to work on stuff that I think matters.

Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe.

Instead of war on poverty, they got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.