I know three people who have got better after a brain tumour. I haven't heard of anyone who's got better from Alzheimer's.

Coffee is a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self.

Money makes people rich; it is a fallacy to think it makes them better, or even that it makes them worse. People are what they do, and what they leave behind.

I read the best works of some of the best satirists, and indeed best writers from the beginning of the Victorian era to about the 1960s. If you want to be a blacksmith, you go and watch the blacksmith working, and you work out what the blacksmith does.

Some things are fairly obvious when it's a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe telling you them.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

Everything makes sense a bit at a time. But when you try to think of it all at once, it comes out wrong.