The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.

I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer.

As a bookish adolescent, I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid.

The cynics are correct the sense of freewill is only that feeling which we have when we take the necessitated option that most appeals to us.

Of course, with well-masticated food playing the role of social glue, it's absolutely essential that everyone clear their plate. Sod the starving kiddies in Africa - it's the overfed ones here we need to worry about.

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

The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have no outstanding qualities of its own, being merely a way-station through which events travel to the vast shadow lands of the past.