There used to be a tradition of the loveable rogue who would steal from the honour boxes in churches and buy a round of drinks with the money he snagged. And everyone would find him tremendously good company. But not any more.

Your ability to rationalize your own bad deeds makes you believe that the whole world is as amoral as you are.

Ten commandments yet seven deadly sins: conflict?

I was so beautiful when I was young. And I took so few photos because I felt so skinny and ugly. I wish I'd just taken a few more shots.

Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships.

The modern economy isn't about the redistribution of wealth, it's about the redistribution of time.

I don't think I see the world in terms of stupid or clever, but in terms of being able to get irony. There's some awful statistic about only 20 per cent of Americans being able to understand irony.

Depression is when you have lots of love, but no one's taking.

Every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar.

When the world throws you too much information, the only way you can stay sane or survive is to look for pattern recognition. Amidst all the blurs, is there a constellation that emerges, is there a straight line that's emerging?

Fashionable people can opt out of the fashion stream, but a stylish person never becomes unstylish unless they hit their head on a rock and suffer brain damage.

A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you're past it.

Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.

I like being surrounded by good ideas. Every single time you walk past something you like, you get a blast of happy chemicals to the brain, and I like that.

The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.

I don't want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.

Much of what we now consider 'personality' will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain.

In a faraway land called 'pre-2000,' what Earthlings now call blogging was called 'keeping a diary.' It's hard work to do well. I tried doing it in the early 1990s but had to stop because I no longer had a life - instead I had this thing that generated anecdotes to go into my diary. The diary took over and I had to stop.

If you're not a tree hugger, then you're a what, a tree hater?

Adventure without risk is Disneyland.

Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it's going to disappear completely.

Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.

Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.

Everyone should have a tailor. David Wilkes, the guy who does my stuff, is like, 'Well you're a writer - do you want a special pen compartment or something?' Bespoke: That's the term you want to get out there.