Is there anything more useless than a crouton? I sometimes wake up in the small hours with a start and realise that what's roused me is an overpowering urge to visit violence on its originator.

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

What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim "You know exactly what I mean!" depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.

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

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

Ideologists of all kinds find a strange sort of comfort in the madness of the crowd; it confirms them in their suspicion that history, far from being made by the great mass of individuals - as Marx averred - is rather unmade by a single massive individual, a collective Other, who stands in stark contrast to you and he.

As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.