You can be so much in a room that the world outside turns to water. You’ve got the heater blowing out burnt air, but you still don’t get warm. Your ankles are singed, but your head’s in a bucket of ice. Time drips like a stalactite. The water for the coffee boils away in a tree of steam.

You’d better make it your business to understand the market. The ability to charm or play the game is useful.

An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys.

It’s just a freak of fate that I’m paid to write, not paying to print my own books – but I’d be doing it anyway: it’s my life.

Getting comprehensively lost in a car with a full tank of petrol at someone else’s expense, you can’t beat it.

Life and career are the same thing. Every life has to have a plot and a plan. You have to recognize this early and be quite cold-blooded in the discovery and articulation of that plot.

Geography is destiny. – James Ellroy.

The suicide hour of cold coffee and alien voices on the radio.

Why not add another yarn? That’s all we are in the end, any of us, a couple of dozen unreliable stories.

The faster we walk, the more ground we lose.

Mossy had trouble breathing. He was not convinced the rewards repaid the effort. He took breath in, but after that let it fend for itself.

He stood, fluffing his feathers: as poet, priest of place, shoulders sloped like folded wings; magenta scarf, scarlet lining to anorak, black-rimmed spectacles and aureole of wizardly white hair.

MIDSUMMER: the shortest night. The year on its side. Joblard is to marry. To make that act, that avowal: St Bartholomew-the-Great. The Chemical Wedding, sponsus and sponsa, merging in song, twisting around the columns of that stone forest; celebrated here in the blending of russian stout, nigredo, with dry blackthorn cider. The risks crowd us, cackle; magpies at the window.

With plenty of practice, we have learnt how to make a ritual of grief, even for those we have never met and know little about.

You can’t leave the thing that you are, the house that has become your biography.

Hackney at certain epochs has given itself suburban airs and graces, before being slapped down and consigned once more to the dump bin of aborted ambition.

What I write, I write. I’ll always do it in some form.

If the landscape changes, then I don’t know who I am either. The landscape is a refracted autobiography. As it disappears you lose your sense of self.

You can’t impose a legacy.

The negotiation of city space has been made more difficult with the idea that redevelopment is an improvement for some vague future – but it’s never like that, is it? Once you get there, for economic reasons you have to generate the next project – so you’re immediately starting to dig up something else, and so it goes on.

The only times I’m not relaxed are when I haven’t got a project on the go.

The kind of world I’m endlessly going on about is pretty well doomed, but nevertheless I think there are recesses of it worth celebrating.

I don’t feel proprietary, but I do feel there is a human identity to the borough of Hackney that’s quite peculiar. It was always bloody-minded and difficult; it always stood up to central government.

If people are telling you a story about themselves, they gradually map their own local territories and know themselves by them.

An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys.

There is an obvious connection, on the declining Roman empire’s bread and circuses model, between political enthusiasm for public spectacles and the periods when we are least able to pay for them.

With the world as it now presents itself, there is something perverse, and probably dysfunctional, about a person who stays in the same house for 40 years. What about the expanding family syndrome, the school-lottery migration, the property portfolio neurosis? Have you no imagination?

To try to fix the future is a manifest absurdity.

I am crumbling in sync with old Hackney.

The world changes, but I want that change to be necessary or respectful of what has happened before. Everything changes, and that’s quite right.