The fictional work is a kind of actor that wears a satirical garb but can put on other costumes as well.

There is something mysteriously powerful that can happen when young, inchoate minds come into contact with older and more worldly ones in a spirit of intellectual and creative endeavour - if I believed in progress, I suppose that's what I'd call it.

Nowadays, my mood ungoverned, I'm free to think the most outrageous things, such as: might it not be a good idea to insist that drug companies give their preparations names that tell the user what they really do?

Television is the same as the telephone, and the same as the World Wide Web for that matter. People who become obsessed by the peculiarities of these communications media have simply failed to adjust to the shock of the old. People who bleat on about the 'artistic' potential of television qua television are equally deluded.

Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.

Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.