I read 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford again every so often..

The simile has to match the tone of its surroundings and has to be like a little joke. Writing a simile that isn't funny on some level is quite hard..

I hate going back over what I've written. It makes me feel physically sick..

I would love to learn how to air kiss non-awkwardly..

Statistically, you don't have much chance of becoming president if you're not tall and fairly handsome or at least conventional-looking..

You couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate at least something. Indeed, perhaps you couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate almost ev….

The reason I start a novel is because there's something that excites me and I want to explore it..

If I want to feel as if I'm being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home..

Until I was 16, I read nothing but science fiction. I loved William Gibson and I still do. But my favourite book when I was growing up, for a long ti….

There are probably a couple of things I'd never write about until everyone I know is dead. And then there's other stuff which nobody would want to re….

Plot is tremendously important to me: I can't stand books where nothing happens, and I can't imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder..

I always save a huge book for a flight, because then you read it at both airports and on the plane and by the time you get home you're a quarter of t….

I'm reasonably good at talking onstage, but actually holding court in a pub is all to do with power dynamics which I don't think has anything to do w….

I never really have blank page syndrome. I don't get blocked. I have a plan for my novel before I start which, although incomplete, probably contains….

I guess the main thing I definitely don't enjoy is having a job which involves selling things. You become an author because you think you're good at ….

There's never a bad time to put earplugs in. They're the kind of thing you can reject as a bit lame, but somebody told me to do start wearing earplug….

So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene..

I was always determined that one way or another I would force a book on the world, even if I had to resort to writing one about a tabby cat who solve….

It seems to me that the basic plot of all historical novels is a romance swept aside by history..

I don't have a day job, so I read any time of day..

I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since..