Like most writers I spend a lot of my time sort of thinking, "It's such agony, I can't do it."

In foreign countries, when people see what Donald Trump is saying on Twitter since the election and seeing what he's saying in these calls with foreign leaders, they take everything very seriously and they take everything very literally.

[William] Eggleston's photographs look like they were taken by a Martian who lost the ticket for his flight home and ended up working at a gun shop in a small town near Memphis. On the weekend he searches for the ticket - it must be somewhere - with a haphazard thoroughness that confounds established methods of investigation.

One of the reasons so many nonfiction books are so boring is because what they've done, very diligently, is fulfill the terms of their proposals. They've written up their proposal, long-form, and often what this does is then set up a sort of serial deal, where the whole book can essentially be reduced back to the size of the original proposal!

I've never been much drawn towards satire of any kind. I don't like that style whereby you kind of stitch people up. But the deeper thing is that I just find these people so impressive and admirable.

Quite often, ambition operates on a level of irritation. Not even jealousy, just irritation.

Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.