I love writing journalism because it's all over in two hours and comes straight off the top of the head. Writing novels is soooooo much harder. It's the hardest thing I've ever done.

Of one thing there is no doubt: if Paris makes demands of the heart, then Munich makes demands of the stomach.

It's very hard to self-motivate without someone standing over you snarling, ready to hurl the chalk at your head at the slightest slackening.

If there's anything worse than being 16, it's having parents visibly reliving their own teenage years in your anguished presence.

Without my Johnson trademark mop of yellow hair, I think I would be nothing.

I talk to bankers, distributors, marketing people. I used to sit at home in my tracksuit bottoms, and the real excitement of my day would be going out to get a copy of Private Eye and a latte.

Of course I'm naughty. I've always had to compete for attention, you see.

In Germany, salads are assemblies of ham and mayonnaise, not trendy tossed leaves.

When I'm called unkind... that really cuts to the quick. You can say anything else that you like about me.

Don't worry about never having time to write. Just write what you can in the time you do have and give yourself a big clap on the back, followed by a double latte and a blueberry muffin.

I do not think that having children - I have three teenagers - keeps you young. The reverse. It thrusts you into a full-frontal confrontation with your own all-too-obvious maturity.

It's worse for you. You want the guilt to absolve you. Just like you want your wife and child to absolve you. Once absolved, you can kill or take soup.

Nothing, save the hangman's noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash.

There is a certain calling in your life from the heart of God

Nothing feeds the center of being so much as creative work. The curtain of mechanization has come down between the mind and the hand.

In Los Angeles, they don't want you to fail, they want you to die.

The singing man keepes his shop in his throate.

I feel blessed that I get to be part of entertaining people in any capacity.

The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way, that is, completely.

People are much more interesting than people realise.

Nintendo DS is not standing still. As a tenth serious competitor decides to make a run at Game Boy, DS raises the bar on portable gaming, before they even get started.