You were the living image of the entire Platonic shadow show, an illusion that could fill my emptiness with marvellous, imaginary things as long as, just as long as, the movie lasted, and then all would all vanish.

She said to the Daisy girl with her big brown eyes: 'I will not have it plain. No. Fancy. It must be fancy!' She meant her future. A moon-daisy dropped to the floor, down from her hair, like a faintly derisive sign from heaven.

My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day.

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

Love is desire sustained by unfulfilment.

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.

He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.