Because,' she said, 'when you're scared but you still do it anyway, that's brave.

I was the kind of person who knew what he wanted to do; I wanted to write, I wanted not to be in school, and I felt that university would just be spending another four years of my life before I could write.

It sounded like a piece of blackboard being dragged over the nails of a wall of severed fingers.

When things go wrong, this is what you should do. Make good art.

Night was spreading slowly around the spinning Earth. It should have been full of pinpricks of light. It was not. There were five billion people down there. What was going to happen soon would make barbarism look like a picnic - hot, nasty, and eventually given over to the ants.

There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

I'm never, I hope, stupid enough to believe that Twitter or blogging or any of this stuff is a substitute for actually doing the work or writing a book.