The cultural products of America from this period [ fifties and sixties] are like a vision of paradise or something. I find it utterly intoxicating.

When I think back on it, I have a sense of relaxation, as if in the seventies no one had to try to be anyone other than who they were. I'm sure that's not really true, but that's how I remember it, and I suppose it might be relatively true.

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

I feel like the seventies was a decade where things ran out, and where other things set in. There was just a lurking graininess and seediness about the decade, a slight grogginess of the hangover from the sixties.

I think the seventies caught the last red rays of the dying sun of this innocence, but were already a little cold and drab.

The weird thing is, I'm not entirely sure that I am meant to think that such a gift is who I am according to the philosophy underlying Vedanta. But I have long been stubborn like that, for some reason. It's a gift, as I say.

People didn't talk about paedophiles in the seventies, I don't think.