There in the midst of the Amazon Jungle, Simon Haskell has cobbled up for himself a replica of an Art Deco salon.

I am not one of these people who instantly takes umbrage when he's corrected or - I love being corrected.

I think love and sex are separate and only vaguely similar. Like the word bear and the word bare. You can get in trouble mistaking one for the other.

I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned. Adult. You have become adult.

What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal dreads... The closer I get to the burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better is my work.

In these days of widespread illiteracy, functional illiteracy... anything that keeps people stupid is a felony.

The more you know, the more unflinchingly you deny casual beliefs and Accepted Wisdom when it flies in the face of reality, the more carefully you observe the world and its people around you, the better chance you have of writing something meaningful and well-crafted.