Politicians often like to suggest that their policies come about through objective thinking, but if you look at British fascists, for example, what y….

I'm very finicky about when I'm in the right mood to write. So most days, I find some excuse not to do anything..

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

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

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….

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

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

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 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….

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..

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….

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….

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

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

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….

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….

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….

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 ….

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

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

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..