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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Wrinkles - the service stripes of life.

He did nothing in particular And did it very well.

Never assume that the guy understands that you and he have a relationship.

All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.

A time comes when you need to stop waiting for the man you want to become and start being the man you want to be.

I think the really good mountaineer is the man with the technical ability of the professional and with the enthusiasm and freshness of approach of the amateur.

The fact that my songs take a long time to write is no guarantee of their excellence.

We're not choosing the art, the art is choosing us. The pieces are choosing the walls where they hang.

Every Warrior of the Light has, at least once, believed he was not a Warrior of the Light.

To be true is manly, chivalrous, Christian; to be false is mean, cowardly, devilish.