there're times when i suspect that the mind has a mind of its own. it shows us pictures. pictures of the past and the might-one-day-be. this mind's mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice
The soul is a verb. . . . Not a noun.
But thought has no eyelids to close or ears to block...
How gleefully life shreds our well crafted plans.
I can't bear living in this huge beautiful world and not try to imitate it as best I can.
If losers can exploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.
She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman.
Women, O, women! They'll find the baddest meanin' in your words & hold it up.
Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience.
Japanese food makes me feel particularly good.
When I talk about my artist parents, people imagine a bohemian environment and think, 'Aha, so that's where he gets it from!' But we were as white, straight, and middle-class as the next family on our white, straight, middle-class housing estate.
A life can get knocked into a new orbit by a car crash, a lottery win or just a bleary-eyed consultant giving bad news in a calm voice.
I've become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave.
If the human condition were the periodic table, maybe love would be hydrogen at No. 1. Death would be helium at No. 2. Power, I reckon, would be where oxygen is.
When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship.
I'm not a great deep political thinker.
Write something every single day, even if it's just three lines. And it doesn't matter if it's any good - just write something every day.
As long as our civilisation keeps trundling along generally forwards, then there is the possibility of a future where ethnicity is merely an interesting badge, not a uniform you can't take off.
Sometimes, comics will make the observation that it's not jokes that are funny, it's characters that are funny. And isn't that true! That's why I always kill jokes. I'm terrible at them, because I get the joke right, but I can't get the character rig...
When you're out of your own cultural context you have conversations with yourself that you just don't have at any other point in your life. When you're in a hotel room on the border between India and Nepal you can really discover things about yoursel...
The state of childhood resonates with life inside a fantasy novel. If you have no control over how you spend large chunks of your day, or are at the mercy of flawed giant beings, then the desire to bend the laws of the world by magic is strong and de...
