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

People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.

Mother sighed with exasperation. "Look, there aren't any "people in charge of death". When you die you move to another part of London, that's all there is to it. Period.

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

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

So I was smacked up on the Prime Minister's jet – big deal.

With spectacular events taking up so much of the available anxiety quotient, we need to be constantly reminded of the more workaday threats to our mortality - threats that, while they may also be functions of human error, have become so ubiquitous that we've begun to apprehend them as natural phenomena.