Most people in the West are not politicized. They're the most simplistic consumers - they're animals, basically.

I'd always done a lot of sniffing glue as a kid. I was very interested in glue, and then I went to lager and speed, and I drifted into heroin because as a kid growing up everybody told me, 'don't smoke marijuana, it will kill you'.

If I stop working and publishing, and TV, and film and all that, I would be dead within a couple of weeks. I don't really have that kind of off-switch.

Basically, particularly in Britain, it's a hegemonic thing that people who write tend to come from the leisure classes. They can afford the time and the books.

In America I think we need to move towards a social democracy, European-style basically, and I think that in Britain we do as well.

We have to concentrate back on: Where is the money going? Where's it been going for the last thirty years? How do we start to redistribute the cake more evenly, and give people opportunities? That's as much about poor white people in West Virginia as it is about poor black people on the Southside of Chicago.

The books that are really valuable are the books that evoke a sense of place.