I think Eros should be dirty. In Greek legend, as I'm sure you are aware, he fell in love with the minor deity Psyche. It was the Greek way of saying that, in spite of what it may believe, Love pursues the Soul, not the body; the Erotic desires the Psychic. If Love was clean and wholesome he wouldn't lust after Psyche.

Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because they opened windows in the mind, they put their arms round you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe. Even if their names were terrifyingly foreign and intellectual sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire or Cavafy, they turned out to be charming and wonderful and quite unalarming after all.

What makes a good family? Well, I suppose obviously love. Love lubricated often I think by humor. I think a family that can laugh at each other and tease themselves and who are able to be jolly with each other I think is the key.

Self-consciousness, that's what it is. Always my abiding vice. I keep seeing myself. Me watching myself watching others watch me. How do you lose that? What's the trick?

Simon Gray, I decided when I first witnessed this frog into prince transformation, did not have a drinking problem. He had a drinking solution.

I found it all about as arousing as a Tupperware party.

I'd probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I've always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing.