People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.

Some people have human muses - mine is a city. I feel a startling ambivalence towards London, but for better or worse my work has come utterly to depend upon it.

As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in . . . The edit.

With spectacular events taking up so much of the available anxiety quotient, we need to be constantly reminded of the more workaday threats to our mortality - threats that, while they may also be functions of human error, have become so ubiquitous that we've begun to apprehend them as natural phenomena.

It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind; it is that it dulls it.

Vaughn's vision is older, wiser and harder than Ritchie's.