For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of this work were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any." He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind." I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing—and if they don't want to support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.

So, look, I read lots of books, lots of them, you know, especially when I went from programmer to a business, realizing I have to just learn business really quick. I got really dismayed with the quality of business books pretty quickly, because frankly, I think the business books are largely written by the people who have time, who are not the people who actually build companies, frankly.

Writing fiction is not “self-­expression” or “therapy”. Novels are for readers, and writing them means the crafty, patient, selfless construction of effects. I think of my novels as being something like fairground rides: my job is to strap the reader into their car at the start of chapter one, then trundle and whizz them through scenes and surprises, on a carefully planned route, and at a finely engineered pace.

Many people talk about a willingness to have failures. I hate failures. I don't think you should strike to make failures. I think it's OK to make mistakes – but by the time they become real failures, you probably should have discovered them much earlier.

As many of you know, I observe specific protocols to open the creative mind – I sit at a desk in my office and write, working exclusively between 9am and 5pm. Within ‘office hours’ I find my mind becomes genuinely free, and I feel a creativity that is qualitatively richer than anything I may experience outside of this time, in the disorder and distraction of the ordinary world. For me, what must appear to some as forced labour is where all the imaginative mischief, beauty, and love are free to happen. Freedom finds itself in captivity.

I’m envious of people who don’t need that. There are people that just wander round the world and ideas fall down from wherever, and they sit and they strum a guitar one day and they write a song, and then they carry on living. I could never work in that way.

The artistic process seems to be mythologized quite a lot into something far greater than it actually is. It is just hard labor. […] As anyone who actually writes knows, if you sit down and are prepared, then the ideas come. There’s a lot of different ways people explain that, but, you know, I find that if I sit down and I prepare myself, generally things get done.