The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.

So heedless have we become of our own image that second-hand mobile phones now invariably come with a SIM card chock-full of discarded intimacies.

Why is Mr Universe always from Earth?

There is a deep sadness to American poverty, greater than the sadness of any other kind. It's because America has such an ideology of success.

Some people have human muses - mine is a city. I feel a startling ambivalence towards London, but for better or worse my work has come utterly to depend upon it.

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

You can always spot a 'television personality', even when they aren't actually on television, because they carry their 'made-up' persona in front of them, like some sort of baffler, or Ready Brek force field. Their reach for notoriety predicated on that fulsome mediocrity of talent detailed above has become frozen in their faces.