Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core.
An idler and a sluggard are as different as a gourmand and a glutton.
If only,’ Shiroyama dreams, ‘human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders.
In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people, but we're now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket are only three of the best known among a good number of equals.
Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretatio n for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable.
I really wish they hadn't made the set out of asbestos.
Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.
As long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens.
Lunatics are writers whose works write them.
For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.
Historically, unfortunately, race seems to be the major division that humanity has imposed on itself, a way of subdividing into smaller groups.
I can write pretty much anywhere.
I love HBO productions, actually, like 'The Wire.'
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.
Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.
Often I think boys don’t become men. Boys just get papier-mâchéd inside a man’s mask. Sometimes you can tell the boy is still in there.
To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom.
Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints.
Wars do not combust without warning. They begin as little fires over the horizon. Wars approach. A wise man watches for the smoke, and prepares to vacate the neighborhood, just like Ayrs and Jocasta. My worry is that the next war will be so big, nowhere with a decent restaurant will be left untouched.
Ive never had cocaine. I work in showbusiness and no one has ever offered me cocaine. Can you believe that? It makes me worry Im not always the life and soul of the party that I feel like in my head.
I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it's taught writers.
The human world is made of stories, not people.
The best way to get out of debt is not to seek to get out of debt, but to seek to create wealth
Japanese food makes me feel particularly good.
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