Ned Beauman Quotes
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 everything.
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've never really understood that whole thing of writers avoiding other writers' novels while they're working on their own.
It seems to me that the basic plot of all historical novels is a romance swept aside by history.
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 read a book about anyway.
Naming one thing after another cannot, logically, increase the chances of the new thing turning out like the old thing.
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 solves mysteries.
I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.
Statistically, you don't have much chance of becoming president if you're not tall and fairly handsome or at least conventional-looking.
You are right that a man needs light like he needs bread, but a man needs a little darkness, too, if only so that he can sleep, and dream.
So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.
The reason I start a novel is because there's something that excites me and I want to explore it.
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.
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.
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.
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 earplugs and it turned out to be great advice.
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 with fiction.
...a tall, gaunt man with small narrow eyes set deep in his skull like two old sisters trying to spy out of the windows of their house without being noticed themselves.
She had so many freckles that Erskine wondered if she might have stolen some from other children.
