I resent the creation of a world in which beauty is a reminder of what we're losing rather than a celebration of what we have.

Sympathy for victims is always counter-balanced by an equal and opposite feeling of resentment towards them.

I'm easy to work with, not a pushover, but I respond to criticism and find it inspiring.

The earth only has so much bounty to offer and inventing ever larger and more notional prices for that bounty does not change its real value.

My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they've read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!

You're mugging old ladies every bit as much if you pinch their pension fund

The internet was supposed to liberate knowledge, but in fact it buried it, first under a vast sewer of ignorance, laziness, bigotry, superstition and filth and then beneath the cloak of political surveillance. Now...cyberspace exists exclusively to promote commerce, gossip and pornography. And of course to hunt down sedition. Only paper is safe. Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar, you have to hold it, you have to read it.