Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.

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

Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak.

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.

For myself, I haven't been content to carry on producing books that merely strain against the conventions - as I've grown older, and realised that there aren't that many books left for me to write, so I've become determined that they should be the fictive equivalent of ripping the damn corset off altogether and chucking it on the fire.

We've clearly entered a period in which the analog of text is no longer important or relevant. All text will be electronic. I accept that fact. My house has thousands of books in it, and I've started to look at them completely differently. They now seem to me to be like antiquarian objects. Their use value has become negligible to me because I'm perfectly happy to read on an e-reader.

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