Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.

Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.

School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.

We are living in a world in which we don't give the young enough reason to live. The temper and the lyrics of a lot of punk music and so on is very, life sucks and then you die, sort of theory. I feel life is cheaper and death is more attractive now than it was when I was an adolescent, as I remember. Suicide was a personal pathology when it was committed. There was no society approval of it, like there certainly is in Palestine and some quarters of Iraq.