However, I think I managed to reach a new level with Koko, and I will always be grateful for the experience.

There have been times when I reread - or at least leafed through - something because I'd sent a copy to a friend, and what usually happened was that I noticed dozens and dozens of clumsy phrases I wished I could rewrite.

An average working day begins at 8 or 9 am, includes an hour for lunch, and ends at 5 or 6 pm.

It is as though some old part of yourself wakes up in you, terrified, useless in the life you have, its skills and habits destructive but intact, and what is left of the present you, the person you have become, wilts and shrivels in sadness or despair: the person you have become is only a thin shell over this other, more electric and endangered self. The strongest, the least digested parts of your experience can rise up and put you back where you were when they occurred; all the rest of you stands back and weeps.

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.

God, in the orthodox view, causes famine, plague, and flood. Was God evil? Evil is a convenient fiction.

What would be frightening about me jumping out of the bush wearing a pig mask is not the sudden surprise, not me, and not the pig mask, but that the ordinary world had split open for a moment to reveal some possibility never previously considered.