I like texting as much as the next kidult - and embrace it as yet more evidence, along with email, that we live now in the post-aural age, when an unsolicited phone call is, thankfully, becoming more and more understood to be an unspeakable social solecism, tantamount to an impertinent invasion of privacy.

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.

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

Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.

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

Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak.

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