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.

Sometimes, when I hear people without experience of addiction blame addicts for their behaviour I feel like saying to them: "You simply don't understand - how can a child be held responsible for doing such a dreadful thing to himself?" But then again, at other times I have to acknowledge: it was done wilfully.

I think the fundamental apprehension is that the city's an organism of some form, rather than being governed from above.

I enjoy doing very high mileages, partly out of masochism and also because I like to feel the shape of the landscape.

To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail - the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short.

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.

Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.