"The creators of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Deadwood are this generation's auteurs. Brett Martin sits them down to discuss the future of television"

Sizemore on writing process - adapting a comic book into an animated pilot

"The suggestion of a ghostly tongue bath was perhaps too much for Foucault to swallow."

"Once, on a trip to Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, he purchased a video disc from a tea shop. Unlike Starbucks, which once sold music intended to relax the listener, the offering in Tikrit was titled "Anger." It was a compilation of bloody images of U.S. and insurgent attacks that was sickening to watch. Anthony bought it not because of its shock value, but because he knew he needed to see it to understand how Iraqi public opinion was being shaped."

"Science Fiction is a massive, ever-expanding experiment with content, and I love it for that, I really do. Nothing else comes close. But I’m always surprised by the way the genre tends (apart from some notable examples) to ignore the experimentation of form. Form is the Host, Content is the Virus." 

"I want to tell an odd, romantic, but ultimately very sad story that shows where this fear of possession on the left comes from. It is set during last the time that British, European and American students tried to be a vanguard for revolution. It shows how that fear can easily lead to a pessimistic belief that all one's dreams for a better future are just illusions - and how that pessimism then came to paralyse the left in Britain throughout the eighties and nineties." I rarely completely agree with Adam Curtis' work, but find his arguments fascinating.

"Francesco Pedraglio, who I saw perform at the National Portrait Gallery last week, spoke of “non-experiential memories”. He meant things which had not happened, but of which we have memories nonetheless. He meant delusions. (In the same evening, Tom McCarthy said “Realism is a literary style with no more purchase on the real than Burroughs or Gysin”.)"

" As I see it, truth is a matter of allusion, not of representational picture-drawing. To improve as a writer means primarily to improve one’s allusive and suggestive power."

"...photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of the middle-class flâneur, whose sensibility was so accurately charted by Baudelaire. The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes… "

"Mutant robots rule the world. Until disproved, this is my working hypothesis."

"..let's take a walk through a small cross section of 20th century leftfield / outsider / industrial music from the early pioneers through to the isolated humans of post 60's liberation leading on to more recent popular outfits inspired by this world such as Stereolab, Liars and Cold Cave. The precursors, the inspiration, the peers and the aftermath. Like any scene, the field of industrial music has many trees with many branches. As a result by no means look at this as a complete list, do not even look at it as a beginners guide, just crawl around and explore some of the mangled marvels created throughout the 20th Century and beyond."

"Prostitution is not your wife in her Christmas scarf announcing that she’s going to the bathroom and will you stay behind and keep an eye on things. It is not the food court. It is not your kid’s high school graduation in the same town you grew up in and your son’s new girlfriend just looking at you, waiting. Prostitution is not obligation. It is not being alone. It is the same hotel, over and over. It’s the virtue and luck and money that brings you to its doors, holds you within rooms without end. It is this patch of carpet without any blood on it, where they found her, where I stand."

Susannah now writing regularly for Forbes. This one will resonate for any freelancer.

"Novelists have an endless drive to aestheticize and to complicate. I know there’s a very strong tradition—a tradition in which I write, myself—about the decoding of the city. Thomas de Quincey, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Iain Sinclair—that type-thing. The idea that, if you draw the right lines across the city, you’ll find its Kabbalistic heart and so on. The thing about that is that it’s intoxicating — but it’s also bullshit. It’s bullshit and it’s paranoia..."

"It's funny to be talking about blogging -- which for its entire lifespan has been dismissed broadly for being superficial and narcissistic -- as being a besieged outpost of well-developed, thoughtful writing, but I think that's exactly what's happening. It's no one's "fault" -- it's just the natural evolution of popular content production and consumption towards the most frictionless state: from books to periodicals to personal websites to blogs to Twitter to the Like button. When a medium comes along that's easier than clicking the Like button -- maybe thinking you Like something -- you can be sure everyone will speculate about and then bemoan its death before moving on."