When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later.. later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches.

Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.

The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.

In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.

The land of embarrassment and breakfast.

(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.

But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.