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.

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.

We've invested millions of dollars in tourism. Now they're trying to industrialize and pollute the ocean. It doesn't make any sense to me at all.

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

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 always better if you're next door. Ideas come up at the oddest times. They don't always come up in a conference call.

The older I get, the more I seek to use a plain prose style, concentrating more on story.