My first real breakthrough collided with the last months of Callaghan's Labour government, which had every intention of enjoying my success as much as I did.

I wish I could go back and re-write my first novel for the first time. Because I really didn't know what I was doing, and although it was published, it is, after all this time, kind of an embarrassment.

To feel our character, our personality, and our personal, hard-won history fade from being is to be exposed to whatever lies beneath these comforting, operational conveniences. What remains when the conscious and functioning self has been erased is mankind's fundamental condition – irrational, violent, guilt-wracked, despairing, and mad.

Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem?

Occasionally.. .what you have to do is go back to the beginning and see everything in a new way.

Sometimes it is right to fear the dark.

Wolf! Right here and now!