A novel seemed the easiest way to get what I had had in my head into the inside of other people's heads. Books are good that way.

I realized the other day that about the only author I genuinely read for pure pleasure is one of the worst authors in the world, a guy called Harry Stephen Keeler, a long dead American mystery writer. He was probably the greatest bad writer America ever produced.

The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.

You have to believe. Otherwise, it will never happen.

The great thing about Batman and Superman, in truth, is that they are literally transcendent. They are better than most of the stories they are in.

There was something about being in the vicinity of Grahame Coats that always made Fat Charlie (a) speak in cliches and (b) begin to daydream about huge black helicopters first opening fire upon, then dropping buckets of flaming napalm onto the offices of the Grahame Coats agency. Fat Charlie would not be in the office in those daydreams. He would be sitting in a chair outside a little cafe on the other side of Aldwych, sipping a frothy coffee and occasionally cheering at an exceptionally well-flung bucket of napalm.

I'm somebody who considers happiness a journey, not a destination.