The marvellous thing about writing, whether it be fiction or journalism, is that it is simultaneously the most intimate and the most anonymous of meetings between people. It is profoundly intimate in reaching into the psyche of another, at the same time as being devoid of social characteristics, cultural characteristics, economic characteristics.

Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.

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.

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

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

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.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.