Wisdom worth sharing, words worth remembering.
If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it but that's not the way to produce good work.
I don't think I am evangelical in my work.
The thing about the 600 words I mean some day you can do a very very very hard day's work and not write a word just revising or you would scribble a few words.
Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.
I'm interested in that drive that rush to judgment that is so prevalent in our society.We all know that pleasurable rush that comes from condemning and in the short term it's quite a satisfying thing to do isn't it?
I don't read 'chick lit' fantasy or science fiction but I'll give any book a chance if it's lying there and I've got half an hour to kill.
'Harry Potter' gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.
I do get recognized but I must say Edinburgh is a fantastic city to live if you're well-known. There is an innate respect for privacy in Edinburgh people and I also think they're used to seeing me walking around so I don't think I'm a very big deal.
Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.
I think you're working and learning until you die.
His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew but rather to impress upon them that nothing not even… knowledge was foolproof.
Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.
