Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Schadenfreude is so nutritious.
Why is Mr Universe always from Earth?
Things are only boring if you are boring.
Always carry a notebook. And I mean always.
Don't look back until you've written an entire draft.
Drug use and procrastination often go hand in tourniquet.
Vaughn's vision is older, wiser and harder than Ritchie's.
So I was smacked up on the Prime Minister's jet – big deal.
A party full of 'likeable' people doesn't bear contemplating.
Who'd want to be a modernist writer in the English-speaking world?
Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak.
Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.
It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.
I do have a fantasy life in which I can grout bathrooms - but not for a living.
It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind; it is that it dulls it.
The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.
Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.
I loathe computers more and more, so I have one I can shut down and shelve like a book.
I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer.
If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.
As a bookish adolescent, I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid.
A creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.
People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.
As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence.
Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.
The fictional work is a kind of actor that wears a satirical garb but can put on other costumes as well.
Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.
The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.
Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.
I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me.
I enjoy doing very high mileages, partly out of masochism and also because I like to feel the shape of the landscape.
Whenever I produce my best work, it's always because I've spent time being idle. Something always emerges after nothing.
I think the fundamental apprehension is that the city's an organism of some form, rather than being governed from above.
I think in retrospect that all those 'alternative'modes of living were little more than exercises in arrested development.
I make no apology for preoccupying myself with architecture, television, conceptual art, restaurants and Jane Asher's cakes.
I write because I feel driven to write. I write from a sense of inner necessity. I don't write for anything other than that.
The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.
As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.
I'm going to end up like one of those old weirdos who lives in a network of tunnels burrowed through trash - yet I do not fear this.
Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.
As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.
The cynics are correct the sense of freewill is only that feeling which we have when we take the necessitated option that most appeals to us.
There is a deep sadness to American poverty, greater than the sadness of any other kind. It's because America has such an ideology of success.
A very beautiful young woman once asked me to sign her breasts. That was back when I was a hip young thing - it's been all downhill since then.
What more chilling indictment of the modern world is there than this: that the condition of the smartphone user is that of a dumb animal. Moooo!
So heedless have we become of our own image that second-hand mobile phones now invariably come with a SIM card chock-full of discarded intimacies.
I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.
There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.
A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.
In our benighted age, when films about amusement park rides and electronic fidgets scoop the honours, perhaps Hollywood redux is the best we can hope for.