Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire.

The reptiles had taken over the city. Once again they were the dominant form of life. Looking up at the ancient impassive faces, Kerans could understand the curious fear they roused, rekindling archaic memories of the terrifying jungles of the Paleocene, when the reptiles had gone down before the emergent mammals, and sense the implacable hatred one zoological class feels towards another that usurps it.

A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.

I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic.

Nudity in photography, whether involving adults or children, is a subject sinking under a freight of political and moral disapproval it could never hope to support, and this is not the place for me to get out the bilge pump. I will only say that critics who tremble so fiercely at the thought of the voyeuristic male gaze miss the point that distance generates mystery and enchantment, and expresses the awe with which the male imagination regards all women.

But I wouldn't recommend writing. You can be a successful writer and never meet another soul. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

I feel that the surrealists have created a series of valid external landscapes which have their direct correspondences within our own minds.