Vampire? Such a provocative word, wrapped in too many clichés and girly novels.

Make sure, as often as possible, you are doing something you’d be happy to die doing.

Beauty breeds beauty, truth triggers truth. The cure for writer's block is therefore to read.

Vampire? Such a provocative word, wrapped in too many clichés and girly novels.

And most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive. Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state. Add all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity. Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself.

The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change.

This was, I would later realise, a planet of things wrapped inside things. Food inside wrappers. Bodies inside clothes. Contempt inside smiles. Everything was hidden away.