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I don’t think I am evangelical in my work.
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.
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.
Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.
The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.
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.