It must be hard for humans, forever floundering through inconvenient geography. Humans are always lost. It’s a basic characteristic. It explains a lot about them.
This was the definition of eternity; it was the space of time devised by the Great God Om to ensure that everyone got the punishment that was due to them.
You get all sorts of people in the library, and the librarian gets it all...
Humans can think inhuman thoughts.
Putting up a statue to someone who tried to stop a war is not very, um, statuesque. Of course, if you had butchered five hundred of your own men out of arrogant carelessness, we’d be melting the bronze already.
It doesn’t matter how you live and die, it’s how the bards wrote it down.
Knowing how bad you could be is a great encouragement to being good.
People are content to wait a long time for salvation, but prefer dinner to turn up inside an hour.
The universe clearly operates for the benefit of humanity. This can be readily seen from the convenient way the sun comes up in the morning, when people are ready to start the day.
It takes forty men with their feet on the ground to keep one man with his head in the air.
Often I sort of work up and down the manuscript. I sometimes used to go ahead of myself to see what was going to happen next, to make certain it fits what was going to be happening soon.
I don’t think about the end game. I’ve got lots to occupy my mind. It’s the rage that keeps me going.
There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.
Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I’m angry about bankers. About the government.
I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.
Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.
There are some people who hate my guts. But that goes with the territory.
I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.
If the government ever imposes a tax on books – and I wouldn’t put it past them – I’m in dead trouble.
There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.