“When writers stop to sharpen pencils or get up and make coffee to proc...” — M. J. Rose Quote

“When writers stop to sharpen pencils or get up and make coffee to procrastinate, they still stay in their heads with their characters. But when you zip over to read email or check your Facebook page, you get zapped out of the fictive dream. It's brutal on my writing.”

“Recognize that the great majority of us aren't trained actors and entertainers. Usually, it's not our faces, our bodies, our personas or our stage presence that sells our books. It's our stories, our visions and our voices.”

“They say every writer really just writes about one thing over and over. I guess my one thing is how the past impacts the present.”

“Episodic TV is notoriously brutal because just when you think 'I've got this, I know this character' you can pick up the script for series four and you die in the first episode - or your character suddenly transitions from a woman to a man.”

“If we do not voluntarily bring population growth under control in the next one or two decades, the nature will do it for us in the most brutal way, whether we like it or not.”

“I don't want to make an album which is full of brutal and jarring techno.”