The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have no outstanding qualities of its own, being merely a way-station through which events travel to the vast shadow lands of the past.

Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.

Sometimes, when I hear people without experience of addiction blame addicts for their behaviour I feel like saying to them: "You simply don't understand - how can a child be held responsible for doing such a dreadful thing to himself?" But then again, at other times I have to acknowledge: it was done wilfully.

This is the paradox for me: in failure alone is there any possibility of success. I don't think I'm alone in this - nor do I think it's an attitude that only prevails among people whose work is obviously "creative".

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

Most of us have had that experience - at around puberty - of realising that, despite whatever efforts we put into our chosen sports, we will become at best competent.

The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.