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.

I would say that, apart from being a writer, I have also always been very conscious of the idea of a 'world elsewhere'.

I've drifted in and out of vegetarianism for years.

I never went to church as a child. I did not .

I did not understand the differences between Catholic and Protestant until I was an adult.

This is the strange thing about existing in time. As [Philip] Larkin puts it, "truly, though our element is time, we are not used to the strange perspectives open at each moment of our lives" - something like that.