Lots of things were there [in the seventies], in the social experience, but not quite named, lurking like a stranger on the edge of the playground.

[Someone] said that what I described as the Buddhist voice - the life-denying voice of censure and guilt - sounded to him very much like a Catholic voice. This is, indeed, a mystery, and it intrigues me, too.

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.

I suppose I could say that to be interested in innocence already suggests a remove from innocence, perhaps a longing for something that is lost.

I think there's a good case for antinatalism. Stephen Hawking has told us recently that we must colonise space to survive, not long after telling us to beware of aliens because they'll probably just do to us as the conquistadors did to the native peoples of the Americas. So . . . exactly why do we want to go on and on, to go forth and multiply in a hostile final frontier? Why?

I really think [William] Burroughs was onto something here, when he said, "Dreams are a biologic necessity and your lifeline into space."

The peculiar thing is that, in focusing only on the here and now, Buddhism seems to despise the world.