I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft.

A creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.

Why is Mr Universe always from Earth?

Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.

I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer.

I'd rather fiddle with my phone for precious seconds than neglect an apostrophe; I'd rather insert a word laboriously keyed out than resort to predictive texting for a - acceptable to some - synonym.