The world is a crazy beautiful ugly complicated place and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy. The caravan keeps moving on and the job of the longform writer or filmmaker or radio broadcaster is to stop - is to pause - and when the caravan goes away that's when this stuff comes.

I mean the beauty of being a writer is it's not like being a swimmer. When they were talking about our Olympic swimmers and they'd say 'Oh she's so old ' and she's all of 25 or something. So the beauty for a writer is that you can keep doing it right into your dotage and I hope to be able to keep doing it as long as I can get away with it yeah.

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract to express it in the most general terms to find some universal formula for it.

As an inspiration to the author I do not think the cat can be over-estimated. He suggests so much grace power beauty motion mysticism. I do not wonder that many writers love cats I am only surprised that all do not.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.

Sid Vicious began the age of participation in which everyone could be the artist. Sid proved that you don't have to play well to be the star. You can play badly or not even at all. I endorsed that attitude. If you can't write songs no problem - simply steal one and change it to your taste.

For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.

It has taken me years of struggle hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple beautiful sentence.

I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they're trying to write about. They have music.