I started blogging a decade ago because I like blogging. Writing’s a kind of lonely thing to do, and I liked the idea of demystifying the process because I loved it as a kid and teenager and as somebody who wanted desperately to write.
Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
When I was young, you know, the first foreign editions that would come in of anything of mine, I’d sit there and look at them as these strange and wonderful artifacts.
I have always felt that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the last sanctuary of the terminally inept.
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
Sometimes we can choose the paths we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all.
I loved the fact that I was suddenly no longer dependent on whether a store took out an ad in the right place, or on the word on the street.
I’m somebody who considers happiness a journey, not a destination.
I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time.
Touched by her fingers, the two surviving chocolate people copulate desperately, losing themselves in a melting frenzy of lust, spending the last of their brief borrowed lives in a spasm of raspberry cream and fear.
I love learning. I tend to stop doing things once I get good at them, and to try something else I’m not as good at, leaving a bunch of fans going, “But he was really good at that. Why isn’t he still doing it?”
The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.
I really like being able to laugh at my own jokes.
I don’t know. I had to be something, didn’t I?
Some hats can only be worn if you’re willing to be jaunty, to set them at an angle and to walk beneath them with a spring in your stride as if you’re only a step away from dancing. They demand a lot of you.
His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.
The problems with success, frankly, are infinitely preferable to the problems of failure.
Writing is flying in dreams. When you remember. When you can. When it works. It’s that easy.
Honestly, if you’re given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don’t say ’what kind of tea?
I’m probably slightly more famous than I’ve been comfortable with. Famous enough to have my phone calls returned is about as famous as I want to be.