The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.

A party full of 'likeable' people doesn't bear contemplating.

I used to find myself goofed out in the street on drugs. And I had such a bad problem with addiction at the time that I didn't mind. I was dealing cocaine and shooting up a lot of cocaine. And that's not a good space to be in.

The seventies were my fattest decade. Overall I think the seventies were distinctly bulbous. People looked chunky, typefaces were rounded, writing implements penile.

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.

Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.