I think that cheap music often does make you dream more than more serious music, whether that's serious music by Beethoven or Miles Davis or Pink Floyd... if the Floyd ever did serious music, which I seriously doubt.

Vertigo doesn't apply in planes for some reason. You think it's some kind of magic and you don't know how it's keeping you up, but when you're on a cliff top it's a different matter.

If you have slightly pathological interest in all the components of places, it forces you to engage with them in a way that perhaps otherwise you wouldn't, and that's the only way I can put it.

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.

While I'm sure people in Britain have money worries, they don't have them like the French do. The French, however much money they have, are worried. They're a very stressed people. It seems to be a very essential component of the national psyche.

For the most part, French cities are much better preserved and looked after than British cities, because the bourgeoisie, the people who run the cities, have always lived centrally, which has only recently begun to happen in big cities in England. Traditionally in England, people who had any money would live out in the suburbs. Now, increasingly, people with money live in the cities, but this has changed only in the last 20 or so years.

One doesn't mind adverse criticism so long as it isn't stupid.