Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.

The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout with publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one's writing, however, is nil - otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.

These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.

The trouble with you, Vic," he said, "is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.

Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.

And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.

The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.