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I’m not sorry it stopped. [on Lady Gaga’s ”Poker Face”]

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The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning.

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Probably in a parallel universe not far from here, I'm working for Nintendo.

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Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things—like composing a fresh metaphor, but...more

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But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.

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Teachers're always using that "in your own words." I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It's their job. Why make us unpick them, just to p...more

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The art teacher's scarlet book was called Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. 'As the title suggests,' Mr Dunwoody saw the book'd caught my attentio...more

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If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.

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Disco's are tricky. You look a total wally if you dance too early but after one crucial song tips the disco over, you look a sad saddo if you don't.

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Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue. "Oy!" yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. "There'...more

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The potatoes were starch grenades. The canned carrots were revolting because that is their nature.

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As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and ch...more

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Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, obo...more

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When you write it, don't write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don't try to give an explanation. Just say that I don't know what to make of it, ju...more

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Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth.