We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.

Grief-stricken. Stricken is right; it is as though you had been felled. Knocked to the ground; pitched out of life and into something else.

I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.

I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it's not.

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.

I rather like getting away from fiction.