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

On the other hand, the seventies were drab. That is, I am utterly fascinated by the fifties and sixties.

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

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 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 seemed to recall some words from an old Zen master, something like, "My Zen cuts down mountains." My rejection of Buddhism was a cutting down of mountains; that is precisely how it felt to me.

I was in just the right generation to have taken feminism seriously by osmosis - also the generation when the breakdown of the family really began and for whom The Smiths were something new and essential.