When I first started writing in my early 20s it was literary criticism for a very eccentric magazine called Books And Bookmen, which allowed me to write, more or less anything.

You always have to find something to say about the subject and in seven cases out of ten there is nothing to say.

Brummies run themselves down, they're very self-deprecating. Whereas Yorkshire people certainly aren't.

Conversion requires a subtler mind. Architects don't like it, architects want to create their own landmark buildings so that people a few years hence will say, 'Oh, that building there is being knocked down, who did that one?'

I think in space or music or art or literature of any kind there has to be some kind of void where the viewer or the spectator or the listener or the reader can insert themselves into it, and there is a certain kind of architectural space which is totalitarian, which does not allow you to do that.

I think the only remotely interesting drug was acid. I had a slightly peculiar attitude towards it I think. Just about everything about hippydom I hated.

I like irrational things. I like scenarios where I can think, 'It would be great if at this point we could do x.' And there doesn't have to be a reason for 'x'.