As a bookish adolescent, I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid.

Schadenfreude is so nutritious.

Of course, with well-masticated food playing the role of social glue, it's absolutely essential that everyone clear their plate. Sod the starving kiddies in Africa - it's the overfed ones here we need to worry about.

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

If the government announced that it was going to allocate a vast tranche of education funding purely to the pupils at the best public schools, there would be a national outcry - and yet this is precisely what the Olympics represents in terms of sports funding.

Nowadays, my mood ungoverned, I'm free to think the most outrageous things, such as: might it not be a good idea to insist that drug companies give their preparations names that tell the user what they really do?

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.