I was 10 when I realised I couldn't stand football. I'd tried, obviously, before this - no one wants to give in to social pariah-hood without a fight. I had stood frozen on pitches, done some running about and shouted a lot, as though I cared.

Like children all over the world, by the age of 10 I'd come to believe that most of the really humane creatures were not really human at all.

It's not a crime not to know yourself. It's not a crime to send life away. It's just a shame.

I'm not interested in writers who are overcome with certainty, with single-mindedness, or with a sense of how consistent and morally upstanding they are. My writers are in the thick of it and they seek the truth, rather than embody it, and sometimes they find truths that don't sit palatably or easily together. That's life. That's personality. And that's writing.

Art you can flush down the loo means nothing to me, even were the loo to be selected by Marcel Duchamp

A living museum must surely see itself as a locus of argument. A breathing art institution is not a lockup but a moveable feast.

Interviewing is not a democratic art.