Ned Beauman quotes:

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

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'm very finicky about when I'm in the right mood to write. So most days, I find some excuse not to do anything.

Naming one thing after another cannot, logically, increase the chances of the new thing turning out like the old thing.

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.

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.

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.

I was always determined that one way or another I would force a book on the world, even if I had to resort to writing one about a tabby cat who solves mysteries.

I would love to learn how to air kiss non-awkwardly.

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.

Just as the best way to judge an adult is by his or her record collection, the best way to judge a pub is by the albums on its jukebox.

I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.

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.

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

If I want to feel as if I'm being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.

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

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.

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.