It's only those exceptional and rare individuals who have brilliant ideas delivered to them by the muse, complete and gift wrapped. The rest of us have to work at it.

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

Dan, I'm not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago.

The Here-and-Now demands attention, is more present to us. We dismiss the inner world of our ideas as less important, although most of our immediate physical reality originated only in the mind. The TV, sofa, clock and room, the whole civilisation that contains them once were nothing save ideas.

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.

Once a man has seen society's black underbelly, he can never turn his back on it. Never pretend, like you do, that it doesn't exist.

I think that storytelling and creation are very close to what the center of what magic is about. I think not just for me, but for most of the cultures that have had a concept of magic, then the manipulation of language, and words, and thus of stories and fictions, has been very close to the center of it all.