If we do overcome linear time, I would hope this means dwelling more directly in the fertility of the imagination rather than denying it, as some aspects of Buddhism seem to.

Zen is influenced by Daoism, which is not so much a nature-religion in the animistic sense as a nature-philosophy in a cosmic sense.

You might call this innocence. I had a sense of another world that had not been spoken of to me.

I feel almost as if I had been born in a vacuum of innocence, and then had to come to terms with the fact that actually, I was born into the middle of history - the rather grimy normality of the 70s, which did, indeed, retain some traces of human innocence, but were also girded about by the demons of experience.

I feel a little as if the Buddhism is creeping back, but I mention all this simply in order to illustrate that there is, in my life, a fundamental sense of conflict between something that I am calling 'Buddhism' and my creative impulse.

We're all more or less interested in the 'swinging sixties', of course, but that's not what I mean. I'm interested in the particular naive glamour that clings to the post-war and pre-Hendrix era.

I'm more a dog person than a cat person.