Most writers flinch at the thought of being completely honest about themselves. So absolute honesty is what marks the true modern.

Films, like memories, seem to re-shoot themselves over the years, reflecting our latest needs and obsessions. In many cases they can change completely, and reveal unexpected depths and shallows. Will Four Weddings and a Funeral be seen one day as a vicious social satire? Could Jaws become as tearful and sentimental as Bambi?

I thought it was a wonderfully conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead - the guy could have been working for Andy Warhol!

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

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.

Nonetheless, Scranton had travelled in space. He had known the loneliness of separation from all other human beings, he had gazed at the empty perspectives that I myself had seen.

Yet she felt an impostor, and already the mask had begun to bite into her face.