I think it's quite difficult to understand what kind of life a writer leads. They might be millionaires, or they might be starving people.

I think jogging is bad for your health. All that pressure on the knees and back cannot be good for you.

But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.

So why not become a mongrel? It's healthy

Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it's something we can't easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it'll just collapse. And everything scatter, as you put it.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

As I say, I have never in all these years thought of the matter in quite this way; but then it is perhaps in the nature of coming away on a trip such as this that one is prompted towards such surprising new perspectives on topics one imagined one had long ago thought throughly.