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

You're miserable, edgy and tired. You're in the perfect mood for journalism.

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.

Santa Monica's only walkable if death is no hurdle. The air's the wrong colour. People put sunglasses on their dogs. It's a hideous place where humans are not welcome and those who stay suffer eight kinds of brain damage.

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.'

So this Zealot comes to my door, all glazed eyes and clean reproductive organs, asking me if I ever think about God. So I tell him I killed God. I tracked God down like a rabid dog, hacked off his legs with a hedge trimmer, raped him with a corncob, and boiled off his corpse in an acid bath. So he pulls an alternating-current taser on me and tells me that only the Official Serbian Church of Tesla can save my polyphase intrinsic electric field, known to non-engineers as "the soul." So I hit him. What would you do?

Tradition - one of those words conservative people use as a shortcut to thinking.