Sometimes it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions - on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets - simply aren't up to scratch.

I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.

The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.

I think the fundamental apprehension is that the city's an organism of some form, rather than being governed from above.

My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.

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.

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