There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.

The fictional work is a kind of actor that wears a satirical garb but can put on other costumes as well.

I think the fundamental apprehension is that the city's an organism of some form, rather than being governed from above.

A very beautiful young woman once asked me to sign her breasts. That was back when I was a hip young thing - it's been all downhill since then.

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.

Is there anything more useless than a crouton? I sometimes wake up in the small hours with a start and realise that what's roused me is an overpowering urge to visit violence on its originator.

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.