I wasn't a keen taker of speed because I didn't like the comedown from it.

At any point in the world's history most architecture is going to be bad but I think there's been a collective mentality since the late Conservative years - the end of Thatcher/start of Major and certainly continued throughout New Labour and continuing now - that new is necessarily better, so there is this neophilia which isn't the vanguard of progress, it's just the vanguard of the construction industry enjoying itself.

I think the French agonise more about being French, I don't think English think about being English that much. I think the Scottish think about being Scottish and the Welsh think about being Welsh, but the English don't really care. But the French think about it all the time, it's an absolute preoccupation.

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

The construction industry likes nothing more than a blank canvas onto which they can impose a brand new building, because that way they can make more money.

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.

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.