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

Once upon a time, I thought that politics was the name we gave to our higher instincts. That was before Margaret Thatcher, who came to power when I was 11 years old.

As a writer I care about America, and care about its carelessness.

I grew up in a working-class community. I come from a big family. I knew Donald Trump would win because I knew he is what poor Americans think a rich person looks like. And I knew that Hillary Clinton would annoy voters in their tens of millions, because she basically sucked at communicating with poor people and seemed like a person who'd been powerful and rich for decades. She was a disastrous candidate. I mean, she was up against a psychopath and she still lost. The country's thinking was beyond her, literally.

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

It was beguiling to live in a country, Scotland, that didn't look enough like itself to be a location for its own movies... I remember consulting a film book and discovering that Arthur Freed decided to shoot Brigadoon in Hollywood because nowhere in Scotland looked Scottish enough.

I wasn't like other boys. At any rate, I wasn't like my three elder brothers: they excelled at football and they were like other boys, going up to bed each night hugging annuals filled with stories about the glories of Pele and Danny McGrain.