But there are times in life when a door opens and you are offered a glimpse of the light on the water, and you know that if you don't take it, that door slams shut, and maybe forever. Maybe you fool yourself into thinking that you had a choice at all; maybe you were always going to say yes. Maybe refusing was no more a choice than is holding your breath. You were always going to breathe. You were always going to say yes.

Plutocracy.' It has a perfect nuance: chilly, inaccessible, icy-rich.

Perhaps writers should never be allowed to get together in a workplace context. It's not like studying computer science, after all. The emotions are at large, and are shared and are questioned. There is a vulnerability.

I'd defend the right for any novelist to experiment with form or language, but if people don't take to it, don't react by making out that they are thick.

Since I've been hired to contribute to the storyline of 'Doom 4' I can say what was always true anyway. I'm working. You see, for a writer, lots of stuff that doesn't look like working is actually working. Looking out of the window, for example. Balancing a pencil on the edge of the desk in order to find its exact fulcrum. Playing 'Doom.

If critics of 'readable fiction' want literature to change the ways people dream, they need first to come down from the mountain and speak to the people.

No one needs a first edition. Whoever wrote it; even if it was Moses.