I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me.

The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.

The whole aesthetics of computers very much feeds into my OCD. They fill my head with obsessionalities and my actions become very repetitive. It seems quite inimical to the dreamy state out of which fiction comes which seems so much less causally repetitive than the way one works on computers.

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

My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.

From time to time, as if heaven-sent to annoy, someone will ask me if I'm self-disciplined when it comes to my work. I usually look witheringly at them and snarl, 'What do you think?' I mean, how do you imagine anyone writes a quarter of a million words a year for publication?

Drug use and procrastination often go hand in tourniquet.