I’m a novelist, journalist and film maker interested in Neuroscience, Conjuring, Hustles, Deception, Illusion, Delusion and the nature of Love.

This is how the TLS summed me up:

Puns, gags, witty observations, surreal flights, there is a laugh of some sort in every line… A quip for Brill is the Cleopatra for which he will give up the world and consider it well lost.

And that’s a fair cop… which is more than you’ll find in The Wire.

Now, with the publication of my second novel How To Forget this is a pretty exciting time. What’s below may not be my life, but it’s a blog of events and tangential thoughts that grind the optics behind my own peculiar views.

Marius Brill

Blotto, stinking, caned, sloshed, smashed, sozzled, pissed; we’ve almost as many words for getting drunk as we do for rain.

Flowers are a terrible metaphor for love. How did they become so powerful?

As soon as you’re old enough to pay tax, idealism is one of those things you realise you can’t afford anymore. Nice ideas like world peace, universal happiness or every day a good-hair-day, gradually seem less achievable.

Simply found this both funny and moving – which is kind of what I try to do when I write….

Break out the Prozac, uncork the gin, curse Gillette for the invention of the safety razor; the year’s most wretched day returns.

The ‘Occupy The-Moral-High-Ground’ camp by St Paul’s protests the greed of the “1%” of the population who possess an astonishingly disproportionate amount of this country’s wealth. But then here, in the borough with the highest property values in Britain you might ask: Is that us? Are we that “1%”?

‘Stay foolish. Stay hungry.’ As if either true foolishness or hunger were a choice; as if anybody who attended Stanford, or could afford Jobs’ products, or even access tweets, could have ever known real hunger beyond day two of the Dukan Diet.

And sometimes we forget that writers are artists…

To help Halloween become a less foreign event there are six basic rules I’ve worked out from years trudging around with my own children…