No trees, sky or ground. No other buildings or fields. No winding path, no brambles, no outhouse or pond or flowers, no sunshine or children playing. Just blackness.

Reality was dawning on him and he hated reality. If you were him, so would you.

Too old for dolls. Too ill for tablets.

You need a father figure in your life.

The only difference between writers and people who don’t write is that writers aren’t afraid to display their demons.

A silence absorbed them both – a lack of sound so potent it blackened the place with something richer than hate.

Even the young can be warriors.

If there’s grass on the pitch,” and gives his small cock a quick squeeze under the desk.

Opposite Pissec sits ghoulish Gottfried Baumauer, a tall, skinny workaholic with dark-ringed eye sockets and long, yellowing smoker’s fingers. He’s thirty-eight. He doesn’t say much. He drinks a lot of tea – likes it strong...

If the voice inside your head doesn’t sound anything like you, you might be a writer.

Dwelling on the loneliness inherent in a city such as this when you dream of endless mountains and expanses of blue sky is a recipe for torment.

Fuck choice. I want freedom.

Creativity is as much about order against freedom; control versus rebellion; organisation against disorder as it is about straightforward imagination.

I hate working with sexy women.” Dimitri Pissec.

I suffered my own battles. I suffer still.

Writing is life, not just a ‘job’. It’s lying to communicate the truth, it’s speaking while being quiet, it’s winning and losing at the same time.

Even though I knew, deep down, what she was trying to do, I couldn’t hate her. Even when she hurt me, I forgave her.

No matter what the good boys tell you, criminality is not a level playing field.

For no real reason – well, perhaps because of the seriousness under the trees or Nader’s hair, which was very messy and covered in little grass seeds – Katie began to giggle. She knew it...

You’ve never really loved your wife, have you, Ridley?

The Bible should be taught in schools – in English, with all the other fiction.

Blank walls are a shared canvas and we’re all artists.

It’s much harder to twist the charitable arm of a lottery winner compared to that of a man at his lowest ebb. It sounds like the wrong way round at first, but when you really...

Pissec approaches Pamela Geiger’s cubicle, itching in rhythm with her. He wants to ask her a question while Kalist is out of earshot. She’s not a grass, he’s sure, but stupid people die first.

Baumauer sits at home in silence in the evenings planning how to impress his rigidly strict father who’s in his late seventies, but who still enforces the same dynamic between himself and his three, guilt-ridden...

Books are like rivers, meandering this way and that, but taking us on a steady, flowing course to somewhere different.

A thick rivulet of lost blood reflects a city that will mourn but never die.

I enjoy creating characters, telling lies, having freedom, being myself, challenging perspectives, arguing, creating something everlasting, following in hero footsteps, making readers cry or laugh and occasionally scaring the dinner out of people.

I am driven not for myself, but for others.

A black-haired bitch with man’s hands, widow Liza Van der Bruggenziltch-Finch makes all the important decisions. She is a power-hungry dominatrix. Orwell is her slave. (No one ever sees him.)

I love to pull at people’s heart strings, but I’m no Nicholas Sparks.

I want to question societal norms, encourage people to think in new ways.

Right now, in this dusty anti-paradise, I have absolutely no hand in the future at all.

Katie soon learned there was a problem with hope.

Happy endings. *Groan*

Only men with intelligence, confidence and absolutely no empathy at all can progress upstairs.

She was not alone in her respect for him. Because he is more than a boss to people. He’s a religion for non-believers.

Bea stared at the pencils as if they were enemies.

Books are readable drugs.

The beagles are partying under Geiger’s desk.

She heard him speak, but did not recognise the problem in his voice – only later did she realise it was that thing he’d been concealing – known as guilt.

It’s better to be remembered for what you said, not what you earned.

Trap yourself inside your own brain, switch off the light, block all the escape routes, then turn your back on everything you know to be reality and try and survive there. Try. Living. Nowhere.

I became a physicist to understand the world, then I became a writer to try and change it.

I’m proud to be a writer. I’m doing the job all my heroes did.

Do I need to fire the little prat yet?” Liza Van der Bruggenziltch-Finch.

Remember, it’s called ‘character development’ for a reason – it takes time, patience and understanding to build a fictional person.

A writer who’s afraid to express their opinions is not a writer – they’re just a person with a pen.

I have always hated lies; my own and everyone else’s.

Katie quickly learned the best way is to see another world entirely.