Now there is apparently a causal link between heroin addiction and vegetarianism.

People go to the big urban centres because they have a quality of life, a quality of intellectual inquiry in the big urban centres that you don't necessarily have in smaller, rural communities. I've got loads of friends and relatives that live there. People like living there, bringing up their kids there and all that stuff, but it'd be the death of me. I couldn't be in a small town, ten minutes I'd enjoy it, and then I'd get fed up because you're so constrained and constricted by it.

I was anti-everything and everyone. I didn't want people around me. This aversion was not some big crippling anxiety; merely a mature recognition of my own psychological vulnerability and my lack of suitability as a companion. Thoughts jostled for space in my crowded brain as i struggled to give them some order which might serve to motivate my listless life.

When you're in your twenties, it's the last time you have the chance to experiment with multiple identities, to decide who you're going to be in life.

Nothing is covered adequately by the BBC. The BBC has become the biggest disappointment - they're just so terrified. And in a way it's not their fault: the parties have used them as a political football.

People even split up by text message, they dump each other by text. Everything seems so disposable, so throwaway, but you have to engage with that if you're writing about the modern world. You've also got all these pop references that you feel obligated to make. They're just part of the bricolage of the whole thing, whether or not these are actually significant elements themselves.

I think of the women I know, and very few of them are obsessed with shopping, or with getting a guy - they want their own thing, they have their own network going on.