You heard people say forty was the new thirty and fifty was the new forty and sixty was the new forty-five, but you never heard anybody say eighty was the new anything. Eighty was just eighty.

We wouldn't care so much what people thought of us if we knew how seldom they did.

It can be a way of knowledge, a path, an inspiration, a Tao, an ordering, a memory, a fantasy, a seduction, a prayer, a summoning, an incantation murmured under the breath as the torchlights sink lower and the forest looms taller and the wolves howl louder and the fire prepares for its submission to the encroaching dark.

The City is, in terms of its basic functioning, a far-off country of which we know little.

But knowing that you had gone wrong, and knowing how you had gone wrong, were not the same thing as knowing how to put it right.

The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.

People would rather earn 60 grand in an area where their neighbours earn 40, than earn 80 in an area where their neighbours earn a hundred.