I never seem to find what I'm looking for, though. I suppose I feel, these days, too aware of schedules and things, to let myself get lost in the rain. Anyway, I came back home, and it was still raining, and as I was approaching the driveway of the house, and the front garden with its bushy flower bed, I caught a cooking smell from somewhere on the air. I don't know why, exactly, but it appealed to me as a Nagai Kafu moment.

I have a bit of a struggle with some aspects of or forms of Buddhism, but Zen I find to be mainly congenial.

This strong sense of who I am that I've always had, since I was very young, is what makes me write.

If we do want to do that [ colonise space to survive, ], then vacuous materialism is not going to be enough for us.

People often refer to a creative ability as a 'gift', and, of course, it is, in that, if I had sat down and logically tried to work out who I was and what I should do, I would never have come up with the idea of writing. It was already there, gratis, a given - a gift.

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

I don't believe in sexual love.