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

As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence.

It is fair to say that insofar as sport is taken seriously by those who play it, then to that extent their conduct in play - their ability to deal with loss or victory, their ability to meld strategic thinking and brute force - can be taken as a small-scale model of how they, or others like them, might behave in life.

That tertiary education is under a sustained assault by a political and - it often seems - social consensus that equates all education with training for increased productivity, only makes academe a still more promising environment for a contrarian.

I write because I feel driven to write. I write from a sense of inner necessity. I don't write for anything other than that.

I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer.

Lives don't divide up into chapters. People don't just talk, while nothing's going on in their head, and then respond. You know, none of these things actually happen.