A writer’s job is to cultivate what can go wrong.

My life has been about living like a monk and looking like a priest so that people will come up to me and tell me their most appalling stories. They have to make their confession to somebody, and it might as well be me.

There will always be an underground.

The cancer I don't have is everywhere now.

This is the biggest mistake I could think would save me. I wanted to give up the idea that I had any control. Shake things up. To be saved by chaos. To see if I could cope, I wanted to force myself to grow again. To explode my comfort zone.

No mat­ter how much I try and hide this, bit by bit, I start to fall apart.

To see how boring you really are, write a book about soap and cults, and the profits you make will be your only means of subsistence.