I accepted that a new kind of hate had emerged, silent and disciplined, a racism tempered by loyalty cards and PIN numbers. Shopping was now the model for all human behaviour, drained of emotion and anger.

The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom. In terms of pollution, noise and human life, the price of that freedom may be high, but perhaps the car, by the very muddle and confusion it causes, may be holding back the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society.

Burroughs called his greatest novel Naked Lunch, by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. He's a writer of enormous richness whose books are a kind of attempt to blow up this cozy conspiracy, to allow us to see what's on the end of the fork . . . the truth.

Perhaps the future belongs to magic, and it's we women who control magic.

I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means.

Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker into the game?

The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change.