Occasionally I find a travel book that is both illuminating and entertaining, where vivid writing and research replace self-indulgence and sloppy prose.

A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward.

A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

Don Quixote's 'Delusions' is an excellent read - far better than my own forthcoming travel book, 'Walking Backwards Across Tuscany.'

I went through my purple-prose phase in my songwriting... I was really writing between the lines. And that was what I took into my fiction. That was my apprenticeship, really.

After you've read a novel, you only retain a vague memory of its contents. You remember the atmosphere, the odd image or phrase or vivid cameo.