I have to get out once a week and speak with people or I start thinking I'm the emperor of Abyssinia.

I've been a professional writer for 20 years, and there are contours in that time, crescents and troughs.

Some people feed you with love.

Plutocracy.' It has a perfect nuance: chilly, inaccessible, icy-rich.

The bluebells made such a pool that the earth had become like water, and all the trees and bushes seemed to have grown out of the water. And the sky above seemed to have fallen down on to the earth floor; and I didn’t know if the sky was the earth or the earth was water. I had been turned upside down. I had to hold the rock with my fingernails to stop me falling into the sky of the earth or the water of the sky. But I couldn’t hold on.

George Orwells 1984 frequently tops surveys of our greatest books: its not a celebration of poetic language. Its decidedly anti-literary, a masterpiece of personal and political narrative sequence. And its subject matter is crucial, because what 1984 shows is that language can be a dirty trick.

I'd defend the right for any novelist to experiment with form or language, but if people don't take to it, don't react by making out that they are thick.