Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.

Reading and writing... are exciting. The most exciting things I can think of. And now, as I reflect... I have to say that I've been lucky in that I'm amused by what I do - sufficiently amused.

Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film.

The provincial intellectual is doomed to arguing at low level... there is still no Australian literary world, not in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide. It is some consolation to realise that there is no literary world in Birmingham or Los Angeles either. I have heard there is one in Montreal, but I don't believe it. The literary world is in London and New York, the only cities big enough to sustain magazines which can afford to reject copy.

I won't have to miss smoking any more. Nobody smokes where I'm going: It's like a row of restaurants in California.

John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.

First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.