“Where's the mileage in an autobiography? Anyone who writes one inevita...” — John Cooper Clarke Quote

Where's the mileage in an autobiography? Anyone who writes one inevitably casts themselves as a hero, and I'm not about to do that.

I was pushing for a career in poetry and of course the received wisdom was that you would never make a living at it.

I'm dead fussy about food: I don't eat junk.

I've had a few jobs, but if you want to be a writer, you're better off getting a job that doesn't require that you do anything.

When I sit down to eat, the greatest spice of all is hunger.

When you are what we call a 'minority writer,' a writer of color, a writer of any kind of difference, there is some kind of presumption of autobiography in everything you produce. And I find that really maddening, and I resist that.

I wrote a little autobiography about how luck has to do with everything. It's called 'My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business.' A publisher came to me and said, 'Write a book,' so I did. I wanted to call it 'Everybody Else Has Got a Book.'

An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.

Obviously, in marketing, the best tool is to show the autobiography in fiction. It's inevitable how that happens, but it's generic. Say I've written a story where my sister dies. 'Well, did your sister die?' No, she did not. But people use those straws to grasp at the difference between reality and fiction.