Ned Beauman Quotes

You couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate at least something. Indeed, perhaps you couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate almost everything.

Until I was 16, I read nothing but science fiction. I loved William Gibson and I still do. But my favourite book when I was growing up, for a long time, was 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson, which I must have read about a dozen times when I was a teenager.

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

I hate going back over what I've written. It makes me feel physically sick.

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.

There's never a bad time to put earplugs in. They're the kind of thing you can reject as a bit lame, but somebody told me to do start wearing earplugs and it turned out to be great advice.

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 guess the main thing I definitely don't enjoy is having a job which involves selling things. You become an author because you think you're good at writing. Not because you love to promote yourself. I enjoy some of it and I've had a really fun few years so basically I have nothing to complain about. But what I don't like is the thought that it's going to go on for the rest of my life.

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.

The simile has to match the tone of its surroundings and has to be like a little joke. Writing a simile that isn't funny on some level is quite hard.

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.

The reason I start a novel is because there's something that excites me and I want to explore it.

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

So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.

You are right that a man needs light like he needs bread, but a man needs a little darkness, too, if only so that he can sleep, and dream.

Statistically, you don't have much chance of becoming