In our benighted age, when films about amusement park rides and electronic fidgets scoop the honours, perhaps Hollywood redux is the best we can hope for.

Always carry a notebook. And I mean always.

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.

A creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.

Schadenfreude is so nutritious.

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

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