If you don't know it's impossible it's easier to do.

He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.

But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

Never use five words if you can get away with one, eh? I've known dead men talk more than you do.

It always felt like the price of being a writer was that you would - even in the most terrible moments, there was a little phantom version of you sitting on your shoulder with a notebook going, I can use this. OK, look at the way that the light is glinting off the broken plastic on the road next to the blood. You can use this. And it was always a very strange feeling.

Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

I don't believe in "writer's block". I try and deal with getting stuck by having more than one thing to work on at a time. And by knowing that even a hundred bad words that didn't exist before is forward progress.