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.

It's not that you get a cliché and then wiggle it about or use synonyms. You don't take an ordinary decorative paragraph and give it style. What you're trying to do is be faithful to your perceptions and transmit them as faithfully as you can. I say these sentences until they sound right. There's no objective reason why they're right. They just sound right to me.

He was in a terrible state- that of consciousness.

Sex is hard to write about because you lose the universal and succumb to the particular. We all have our different favorites. Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do - like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.

For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don't want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound.

My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.

Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.