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

As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.

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.

If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.

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.

Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.

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.