The true experimenters are there but no-one hears about them - the critical/review system tends to concentrate on the handful of 'major' writers and their promising successors; bookshops tend not to sell them; publishers don't promote them. It's the same fate as has befallen poetry.

It's basically a home-rule issue. I think the governing authority that appoints people as assessors certainly has reasons for doing it. ... And it certainly ought to be the board of assessors' right to say who is best qualified to serve as an appraiser.

I don't see myself as experimenting in any conscious way, it's perhaps that certain books require different densities of language.

People of this teenager's age are on the brink of adulthood and have to be allowed a greater degree of responsibility. A consequence of this is a decrease in parental responsibility. Therefore to have criminal responsibility for what you don't know about seems rather extreme.

I always thought it better to allow myself to doubt before I decided, than to expose myself to the misery, after I had decided, of doubting whether I had decided rightly and justly.

You look out on the driving range and it looks like snow, but it isn't, it's covered in golf balls.

These days - with the decline of the traditional churches - I'm concerned about where we obtain some form of moral direction.