If you believe something, you can have a morality that means something as well. You can feel recognized as an individual within the universe; it can give meaning to who you are.

Some people have human muses - mine is a city. I feel a startling ambivalence towards London, but for better or worse my work has come utterly to depend upon it.

You don't need to know this - but here goes: due to some acquired infantilism, I feel compelled to fall asleep listening to the radio. On a good night, I'll push the frail barque of my psyche off into the waters of Lethe accompanied by the midnight newsreader - on a bad one, it's the shipping forecast.

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.

Whenever I produce my best work, it's always because I've spent time being idle. Something always emerges after nothing.

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

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