A party full of 'likeable' people doesn't bear contemplating.

Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.

You may have gathered that I am not the most cheerful of revellers - some characterise me as the death and soullessness of any party but it wasn't always so, believe me.

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

I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.

Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.

The only proper suit-and-tie job I've had in my life was the two years in the late 1980s when I ran a small corporate publishing company. I even had a Ford Sierra!