If I stop working and publishing, and TV, and film and all that, I would be dead within a couple of weeks. I don't really have that kind of off-switch.

When two people were in love you had to leave them to it. Especially when you weren't in love and wished that you were. That could embarrass. That could hurt.

It's hard to maintain both smack and crack habbits and remember to keep up mobile-phone payments.

It's only now that I realize that behaviour always has a context and precedents, it's what you do rather than what you are, although we often never recognise that context or understand what these precedents are.

Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.

As a writer, you play this daft game with yourself - you're constantly looking for distractions, anything to stop you from writing, but you're constantly fighting the distractions to write as well.

There is a kind of mysticism to writing.