So heedless have we become of our own image that second-hand mobile phones now invariably come with a SIM card chock-full of discarded intimacies.

Always carry a notebook. And I mean always.

Schadenfreude is so nutritious.

I think the fundamental apprehension is that the city's an organism of some form, rather than being governed from above.

I used to find myself goofed out in the street on drugs. And I had such a bad problem with addiction at the time that I didn't mind. I was dealing cocaine and shooting up a lot of cocaine. And that's not a good space to be in.

The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.

To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail - the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short.