When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.

I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkeness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility.

Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.

I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.

It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.

Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.

We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter.