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

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

As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.

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.

Certainly, for time out of mind, an obsessive dwelling on happier former days has been synonymous with getting older, while it was the juvenescent who rushed with open arms to embrace the future.

It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind; it is that it dulls it.

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