The thing about the 'Melrose' novels is that I have to feel they're impossible when I set out.

You can only give things up once they start to let you down.

Well, the attractive thing about the subject of happiness is that it is notoriously difficult to write.

The whole Melrose series is an attempt to tell the truth, and is based on the idea that there is some salutary or liberating power in telling the truth.

Irony is the hardest addiction of all. Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, the deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.

Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.

It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.