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

Drug use and procrastination often go hand in tourniquet.

I write because I feel driven to write. I write from a sense of inner necessity. I don't write for anything other than that.

As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.

In my view the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels, direct films and put on plays tend to read too many novels, watch too many films and go to too many plays.

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

Political activists of all stripes are usually a wacky bunch, and never more so than in a system like Britain's, where power is effected via the quiescence of the electorate as much as its convictions.