If you're functional, it doesn't matter if you're mad.

I'm dependent on writing for a living, so really it's to my advantage to understand how the creative process works. One of the problems is, when you start to do that, in effect you're going to have to step off the edge of science and rationality.

I love the smell of paper in the morning; it smells like victory.

I increasingly fear that nothing good can come of almost any adaptation, and obviously that's sweeping. There are a couple of adaptations that are perhaps as good or better than the original work. But the vast majority of them are pointless.

I don't think there's really any difference between art - or writing, or music - and magic. And I particularly draw the link between magic and writing. I think that they are profoundly connected.

Why do we argue? Life's so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.

Sexually progressive cultures gave us literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust.