Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison.

So I suppose I do not know how he really looked, and, in fact, I suppose I shall never know, now, for he was plainly an object created in the mode of fantasy. His image was already present somewhere in my head and I was seeking to discover it in actuality, looking at every face I met in case it was the right face - that is, the face which corresponded to my notion of the unseen face of the one I should love, a face created parthenogeneticallyby the rage to love which consumed me.

Not for Moorcock the painful, infrequent excretion of dry little novels like so many rabbit pellets; his is the grand, messy fluxitself, in all its heroic vulgarity, its unquenchable optimism, its enthusiasm for the inexhaustible variousness of things.

Sade has a curious ability to render every aspect of sexuality suspect, so that we see how the chaste kiss of the sentimental lover differs only in degree from the vampirish love-bite that draws blood, we understand that a disinterested caress is only quantitatively different from a disinterested flogging.

I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.

The end of all stories, even if the writer forebears to mention it, is death, which is where time stops short. Sheherezade knew this, which is why she kept on spinning another story out of the bowels of the last one, never coming to a point where she could say: "This is the end." Because it would have been.

I drew the curtains to conceal the sight of my father's farewell; my spite was sharp as broken glass.