Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.

Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.

Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?

The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.

It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.