Quotes from Ned Beauman

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

It seems to me that the basic plot of all historical novels is a romance swept aside by history.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

There are probably a couple of things I'd never write about until everyone I know is dead. And then there's other stuff which nobody would want to read a book about anyway.

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.

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.

Statistically, you don't have much chance of becoming president if you're not tall and fairly handsome or at least conventional-looking.

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

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.