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

[william] Burroughs, incidentally, took up the slogan that we are "Here to go", which contradicts the tendency in Eastern mysticism to advocate staying where you are because there's nowhere to go anyway. I feel conflicted on this one.

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

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

I don't know if Britain ever really achieved that much glamour. We had post-war austerity rather than post-war prosperity, and our cultural products of the time include some pretty dour kitchen-sink dramas of the A Kind of Loving variety. (This kind of film seems disillusioned with the sixties before they've even really begun.)

[Antinatalism ] seems to oppose the idea of writing anything at all. To reproduce is to pass on genes. To write is to pass on memes. In that sense, it really is a kind of reproduction, which antinatalism should, theoretically, oppose, or at least which I feel that it opposes emotionally in my own experience.

The quality of that 'who I am', is what I hope comes out in the writing.