I think the word is counter-productive. Capitalism is counter-productive to art, just as the Catholic Church was counter-productive to art four hundred years ago.

I'm not sure that Van Gogh got up in the morning and looked at the crows and the bizarre clouds and went damn that's a good painting, you know? No, he considered shooting himself, and one day he did.

I like to write adventure stories; that's what I tell myself. But you can't help letting your own personality, your own experiences, slip through.

I was exactly having fun. I was stone miserable, but I wasn't hating doing it; I was loving doing it, but it's just damaged and warped.

You are frightened of everything. You call it caution. You call it common sense. You call it practicality. You call it playing the odds, but that's only because you're afraid to call it by its real name, and its real name is fear.

I was always totally convinced that three weeks after the revolution they'd put me up against the wall and shoot me.

We think literature is immortal, but even that decays and ultimately turns to dust.