The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's.

I like the rain before it falls. of course there is no such thing, she said. That's why it's my favorite. Something can still make you happy, can't it, even if it isn't real.

As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife's money and little bits I was picking up for journalism.

I like the idea of a big caesura between the narratives, a space which readers can fill in with their own speculative history.

Writers never feel comfortable having labels attached to them, however accurate they are.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.

Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that's my problem.