I came to live in Shepperton in 1960. I thought: the future isn't in the metropolitan areas of London. I want to go out to the new suburbs, near the film studios. This was the England I wanted to write about, because this was the new world that was emerging.

The endless newsreel clips of nuclear explosions that we saw on TV in the 1960s (were) a powerful incitement to the psychotic imagination, sanctioning *everything*.

Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?

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

If I don't write, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.

If you're against globalisation, it doesn't achieve much by sort of bombing the head offices of Shell or Nestle. You unsettle people much more by blowing up an Oxfam shop because people can't understand the motive.

Across the communication landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.