I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me.

So heedless have we become of our own image that second-hand mobile phones now invariably come with a SIM card chock-full of discarded intimacies.

I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer.

Death, the real simile for disease - for when we are ill, do we not always feel like we are dying, even if it's only a little? - remains, despite our secularism, the most metaphoricised phenomenon of all.

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.

Nowadays, my mood ungoverned, I'm free to think the most outrageous things, such as: might it not be a good idea to insist that drug companies give their preparations names that tell the user what they really do?

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