Certain people really aren’t getting their emails answered. Certain people are getting their emails answered at a very deliberate and delayed rate. There are certain things that I’m passing up that people think that I should be taking, jumping at and clapping over. There’s a certain amount of refusal happening right now because I’ve got to prioritize my health and my ancestral mandates.

To get this prize, I was required to talk about how important a particular European feminist woman writer had been to me. Now the truth was that I had never managed to finish this feminist writer’s book. It did not speak to me. It would have been a lie to claim that she had any major influence on my thinking. […] I could have said that this woman was important to me, and I could have talked the talk, and I could have been given the prize and a shiny present. But I didn’t.

Do restrict your browsing to a few websites a day. Don’t go near the online bookies – unless it’s research. […] Do not search amazon.co.uk for the book you haven’t written yet.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

Vodka.

I don’t like the concept of not being allowed to go somewhere just because you’re not part of the gang. In London, it seems like everywhere is a club. I hate the fact you’ve got to be a member of one to get a late-night drink in the center. It’s horrible. And I mean, I’m a member of one there, but I never go to it. There’s something about them that is kind of culty, actually—the idea that we are the in-crowd.

Being hit on the head with a brick, and like a bowl of hearty soup.

The Cumming fragrance line. the soap, Cumming in a bar (still available at alancumming.com) is my favorite ever pun on my name.

I do take a break, but I’ve also got – right now, I’m writing another book, another memoir [a follow-up to his bestselling book Not My Father’s Son: A Memoir], so even though I’m on a break technically, I’ve got that. I’ve got a production company so things are always rolling. I’m always spinning a lot of plates.

I really love structure and I think that one of the things I like so much about the theater is the routine. I’m looking forward to this play I’m going to do in London with Daniel Radcliffe, and just the idea that I’ll go to work at the same time every night and I know what I’ll be doing for the next few months. That’s so pleasing to me. I think everyone needs routine and structure in your life.