All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.

Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are.

America is a younger country than England, obviously, and as self-awareness is forming in America - are we a collection of immigrants, are we a load of Italians and Germans and Jews and Brits and Irish, or are we a country with a soul and an identity? - there was a subliminal sense, they knew that the writers would be the ones who would answer those questions.

They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be.

If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are.

He was in a terrible state- that of consciousness.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.