If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all that contemporary, is it

Be authentic to your dreams. Be authentic to your own idea about yourself. Grind away at your own minds and bodies until you become your own invention. Be Mad Scientists.

Stephen King says that if you forget an idea, then it can't have been any good. He means he, not you. You are not Stephen King. Do not attempt to emulate Stephen King at home.

The book is almost always better than the movie. You could have no better case in point than FROM HELL, Alan Moore's best graphic novel to date, brilliantly illustrated by Eddie Campbell. It's hard to describe just how much better the book is. It's like, "If the movie was an episode of Battlestar Galactica with a guest appearance by the Smurfs and everyone spoke Dutch, the graphic novel is Citizen Kane with added sex scenes and music by your favourite ten bands and everyone in the world you ever hated dies at the end." That's how much better it is.

Unless you turn out to be a shining and ballistic genius, then, trust me, if you want to do this then you're going to be spending the next few years doing little else. This is a thing you do at a table with a notebook and a keyboard, and there's no getting away from it. Put in the hours. You don't get to turn off 'being a writer.'

If you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain, do you also believe that television shows are made inside your television set?

The single simplest reason why human space flight is necessary is this, stated as plainly as possible: keeping all your breeding pairs in one place is a retarded way to run a species.