I wouldn't want to try to adapt something of my own. It would be like going back to school and doing all my exams again.

I still have a suspicion of charity and think the state has a role to play in many areas. And although for most of the years since I have been a rather privileged writer, I identify more closely than perhaps I should with those social workers. Had I not become a writer that would have been me. Lots of our friends are still in that world and I do feel part of that generation of people who were rather idealistic in the 70s and became disillusioned in the 80s. Not just about social services issues, but the world.

The evening's the best part of the day. You've done your day's work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.

It was like there was some parallel universe we all vanished off to where we had all this sex.

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them.

Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.