What is universal can be surprising. Over time you find the kind of stuff which has people thinking 'That is just something that occurred to me there's something wrong with me', is in fact stuff that is universal.

I don't see teenagers anymore. I see... I see youths. Slumped S shapes in their hoodies, all huddled round a bin of burning grannies. All texting eachother because they've given up on speech.

The characters can't be wittier than people are in real life. They have to be character witty.

If you covered a broom handle with oil and shoved it up my arse, then put me on a trampoline, in a lift, I could write a better song on the walls.

I don't want to do the same thing over and over again.

A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.

People will kill you over time, and how they'll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like 'be realistic.'