The blood in my veins is frozen but it sings of love.

The thing is, when everyone is trying to persuade you that a thing you know to be true isn't actually true, you start to believe them: not because it is true but because it's easier. It's just the easy way out.

The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.

That's emails for ya: sometimes they're like an arrow that hits so deep in the target, you can't pull it out.

I've been a professional writer for 20 years, and there are contours in that time, crescents and troughs.

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

George Orwells 1984 frequently tops surveys of our greatest books: its not a celebration of poetic language. Its decidedly anti-literary, a masterpiece of personal and political narrative sequence. And its subject matter is crucial, because what 1984 shows is that language can be a dirty trick.