Many people are good at talking about what they are doing, but in fact do little. Others do a lot but don't talk about it; they are the ones who make a community live.
Writing fiction is fundamentally an irrational act.
Sometimes when we think we’re protecting ourselves, we’re really hurting ourselves. And sometimes the people around us too.
Your past comes with you no matter where you go.
AIDS was one of those diseases that a lot of people tried to claim ownership over, and especially as someone who was, fortunately never HIV positive, I wanted to avoid any appearance of doing that.
I'm a novelist. I think fiction is important or I wouldn't be doing it, but most of it's bad.
Most contemporary fiction sucks. It's intellectually dishonest, often morally dishonest. It's cheap and easy. It pretends to be deep but is really quite shallow.
Well we've moved through the funfair a bit - we've done the rollercoaster, now we're on the ghost train.
Investors are trying to work out some risk premiere that have some correspondence with actual risks. But they don't, they're not, they can't go very far that way, because the actual correspondence isn't really there in a lot of cases. So once people stop believing in these stories, and then the crash can come very, very quickly. They believe that house prices are correctly priced for some time and then suddenly they realized there's no real basis for that. But what is the correct price? We don't know that either. It's just that everything swings.
The ones that work out really and ones that become something to the audience, those are the most important people.
In this court the parties changed positions as nimbly as if dancing a quadrille.