You couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate at least something.

What he hates about whisky hangovers, he thinks now, is the synthesis they achieve between the spiritual and the gastric, as if your soul needs to throw up or your stomach has realised life is meaningless.

I always save a huge book for a flight, because then you read it at both airports and on the plane and by the time you get home you’re a quarter of the way through and it doesn’t feel so unmanageable any more.

That was how Sinner got his first taste of anything other than the froth on his father’s ale. It made you grimace, but if you drank enough it felt like discovering an entire hidden room in your own house that you’d never even known about. You wanted to do more than poke your head through the doorway. You wanted to take its dimensions.

Plot is tremendously important to me: I can’t stand books where nothing happens, and I can’t imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder.

I don’t have a day job, so I read any time of day.

I read ‘The Good Soldier’ by Ford Madox Ford again every so often.

I’m reasonably good at talking onstage, but actually holding court in a pub is all to do with power dynamics which I don’t think has anything to do with fiction.

If I want to feel as if I’m being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.

I’m very finicky about when I’m in the right mood to write. So most days, I find some excuse not to do anything.