The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy - rather like a long-term marriage.

The whole aesthetics of computers very much feeds into my OCD. They fill my head with obsessionalities and my actions become very repetitive. It seems quite inimical to the dreamy state out of which fiction comes which seems so much less causally repetitive than the way one works on computers.

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

There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft.

Television is the same as the telephone, and the same as the World Wide Web for that matter. People who become obsessed by the peculiarities of these communications media have simply failed to adjust to the shock of the old. People who bleat on about the 'artistic' potential of television qua television are equally deluded.

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