Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" There's a disease that young writers are susceptible to, which is, I will do this because I can - hubris, I suppose - without stopping to work out why. "

Related Quotes:

" 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. "

" 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 right, and it just goes down like a lead balloon. "

" Japanese food makes me feel particularly good. "

" I've become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave. "

" Writers are so used to books being optioned and then the movie never happens. "

" You can't be a part-time Richard Dawkins. "

" 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. "

" My books are anti-absolutist and deeply distrustful of any religious stance that precludes the validity of any other. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I can write pretty much anywhere. "

" Every relationship has its own language. It takes a long time to evolve and read one another. Just as it's true for people, it's also true on a national or cultural level. "

" I'm from a time and place where bigheadedness was a really savage crime, and you'd get cut down for it by your peers and parents. "

" Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting. "

" I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment. "

" There's been very little writing about speech impediments, even though it's this huge psychological barrier. "

" Historically, unfortunately, race seems to be the major division that humanity has imposed on itself, a way of subdividing into smaller groups. "

" I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called 'global literature' is going. "

" I don't have problems starting writing. I have problems stopping. I'm one of the last dads to arrive at school to collect the kids, because I want to get this paragraph just right. "

" I can't bear living in this huge beautiful world and not try to imitate it as best I can. "

" I still haven't quite got used to eating live fish. "

" It's true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction. "

" 'Y' is about the weakest letter of all. 'Y' can't make up its mind if it's a vowel or a consonant, can it? "

" I love HBO productions, actually, like 'The Wire.' "

" Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things - like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale. "

" 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. "

" I think words operate like musical notes that the eyeball hears. "

" False modesty can be worse than arrogance. "

" I'm not a great deep political thinker. "

" Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again. "