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 guess I've always written more from the opposite perspective, that kind of existentialist perspective which argues that existence precedes essence. And there really isn't anything essential in there - you're the product of your actions, which can always change. And they retrospectively make you one way or another.

It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange.

Full stories are as rare as honesty.

I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.

We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.

Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.