I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.

The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and...

I love Edit. He gives me tons of second chances to make things just right between us.

If we loved Steve Aylett, really loved him in the way that he deserves, a selfless love that genuinely wanted nothing save his happiness and comfort, we’d lobotomise him.

Death is almost never timely, even for the old.

We all have different voices for different occasions. I just turn those voices into characters and put them in my books.

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a...

He without inspiration and motivation exists no more in a world full of innovations and inventions!

Most days, writing simply requires work-ethic, discipline, clarity, focus, time. Other days…it will demand absolutely everything of you.

Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have “essential” and “long overdue” meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual...

I think. I write. I am.

The finder of his theme will be at no loss for words.

Understand now, I’m purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all...

Which story do you want to hear my child?”he picked him up and made him sit on his lap.”Tell us the story of that fairy who lived in a house of wafers,had a garden of...

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there...

Good style happens in one of two ways: the writer either has an inborn talent or is willing to work herself to death to get it.

The biggest spur to my interest in art came when I played van Gogh in the biographical film Lust For Life. The role affected me deeply. I was haunted by this talented genius who took...

Some writers need to sink in order to feel what their characters feel; in order to write their characters with the truest feeling possible. Those closest to those writers end up feeling the effects of...

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he’d managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited...

Young writers need to be encouraged to write – just write – with no restrictions on form, style or content.

Persistence can look a lot like stupid.

he best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a...

Writing is like daydreaming through your fingers.

Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves.

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

Had Mary Shelley fretted so? Maybe yes, maybe no. She’d begun her classic work on a dare. Had culled a dream to bring it into being. But it was not lost on Laura that the...

When authors write from personal experiences,straight from the heart,it touches the readers. Their work speaks out to all who read it,and most of the time,people can relate to what was written. I have always believed...

Your first written sentence is the foundation of all of your dreams.

In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the...

Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers....

A warm sunny evening, the plash and gurgle of the waves in the rock pools, the rush of the cold gin. I thought for the first time of my novel, abandoned, all these years, and...

Writers are born, not created.

Quiet people have the loudest minds.

the intensityin your eyesburns my penas i write.

This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a...

Writers are a product of where we come from but by looking at alternatives to the culture in which we live, we can find ways to change and hopefully improve it.

A man who wields a pen has to be accountable to society.

It’s very fluid, this space between philosophy and literature, and that’s something that resonates for me.

authors of our days” – which days? Better to invent a genealogy based on pure whim and the leanings of our hearts, but what if they don’t agree?

Those who write are writers. Those who wait are waiters.

As a writer one is allowed to have conversations with oneself. What is considered sane in writers is made for the rest of the human race.

Climax: It’s all downhill from here.

Not every owner of a qualified high-qualified for the position, and not every man did not have the opportunity to obtain higher qualification to the circumstances of what that he is ignorant or not fit...

Free to call a spade a spade (and a cock a cock).

And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below. It hurts when you operate, but afterwards you feel much better.

He had let me know time after time that he was a thinking man, a man of intellect and wit. Yet one unintended hungry look into my eyes and he betrayed each of his words...

Wear yourself proudly.

I’ve never been high. Writing is my drug of choice. You don’t ever have to come down from that kind of high, I tell ya. And, best part is, it’s free.

Writers make everybody nervous but we terrify Silly Service workers. Our apartments always look like a front for something, and no matter how carefully we tidy up for guests we always seem to miss the...

No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.