You are right that a man needs light like he needs bread, but a man needs a little darkness, too, if only so that he can sleep, and dream.

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.

Our Lord shouts and screams

You're a good man, Charlie Brown.

My philosophy about the whole thing is that awards are like gifts: it's lovely to receive them, and it is very bad form to covet them.

I think we need not only to eliminate the tollbooth to the middle class, I think we should knock down the tollbooth.

What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.

No problem exists in isolation, one must first reduce it to its basic components, then tackle each component in turn.

Create yourself. Be yourself your poem.

When one approach is not working to reach the desired goal, that's not a reason to abandon the goal. Instead, it is time to devise another approach.

You have to give directors and cinematographers a word blueprint for visuals, but I had to learn that from experience.

Life is really very fantastic, and one has to have a peculiar sense of humour to see the fun of it. [Virtue]