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.

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.

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.

I read 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford again every so often.

I have not betrayed Julia.

To be a saint or a man of too good a nature in today's pragmatic world, with everyone out to get the other fellow, was equivalent to being a fool, wasn't it?

We need cooperation based on trust and self-confidence to create an open, compassionate, harmonious society.

What is a monster? A being whose survival is incompatible with the existing order.

For me, returning to Los Angeles annihilates the memories of where I have just been with an astonishing speed.

Someone once noted that Hugh Everett should have been declared a "national resource," and given all the time and resources he needed to develop new theories.

Culture and education have no bounds or limits; now man is in a phase in which he must decide for himself how far he can proceed in the culture that belongs to the whole of humanity.

One intense hour is worth a dreamy day.

Poverty comes pleading not for charity, for the most part, but imploring us to find a purchaser for its unmarketable wares.

Confidence is the sweet spot between arrogance and despair-consisting of positive expectations for favorable outcomes.