I suppose what I can say is that I do feel I have a natural spiritual sensibility.

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

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

I also remember a line from a song by Smog [Bill Callahan], which seems to describe the experience of a town-dweller moving to the country: "I was raised in a pit of snakes/Blink your eyes - I was raised on cake."

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.

Speaking of [Philip] Larkin, in his poem about the First World War he wrote something like, "Never such innocence, before or since, that turned itself to past without a word".

I'm not claiming anything like sainthood - merely a native perception.