I seemed to recall some words from an old Zen master, something like, "My Zen cuts down mountains." My rejection of Buddhism was a cutting down of mountains; that is precisely how it felt to me.

I'm not sure if there is a cultural loss of innocence specifically associated with the seventies. The oil crisis? The Watergate scandal? I really don't know. There's nothing there on the scale of Hiroshima.

[Someone] said that what I described as the Buddhist voice - the life-denying voice of censure and guilt - sounded to him very much like a Catholic voice. This is, indeed, a mystery, and it intrigues me, too.

I do have a muse. I am not sure how to describe her. She can be very elusive. She was born in England but has Mediterranean ancestry.

I don't believe in sexual love.

In terms of what is expressed, antinatalism is a strong presence, not always explicit, in what I write.

I feel almost as if I had been born in a vacuum of innocence, and then had to come to terms with the fact that actually, I was born into the middle of history - the rather grimy normality of the 70s, which did, indeed, retain some traces of human innocence, but were also girded about by the demons of experience.