“David Goodis didn’t write novels, he wrote suicide notes.”

“Write something, even if it's just a suicide note. ”

“Writing is hard, but I don’t want to kill myself trying to write. Not unless I’m writing a suicide note.”

“Plenty of people were writing novels; in fact, if one did a survey in the street, half of Edinburgh was writing a novel, and this meant that there really weren't enough characters to go round. Unless, of course, one wrote about people who were themselves writing novels. And what would the novels that these fictional characters were writing be about? Well, they would be novels about people writing novels.”

“You're never confident. You go in fear and trembling every day. It would be awfully nice to think that you know how to write a novel. But what you know is the novel you just wrote. You don't have the slightest notion how to write the one you're going to do next.”

“The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes.”