When anyone starts out to do something creative – especially if it seems a little unusual – they seek approval, often from those least inclined to give it. But a creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism – you learn this as you go on.

Mother sighed with exasperation. “Look, there aren’t any “people in charge of death”. When you die you move to another part of London, that’s all there is to it. Period.

Grove Health Center,” trilled the woman on the end of the line. She had the vocal automisation that comes to people whose job description might as well read: ‘Ceaseless repetition’.

He parked in a nearby street and walked out on to the bridge. Below him the lights of London spread away in a wash of low wattage, Their dimness gave the lie to the very vastless of the city. Bull heard its distant roar, its night-time sough, its terminal cough.

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

Dan slept throughout – but a man who sleeps with his head lying on a phone table can never really sleep with a clean conscience.

The life of the professional writer – like that of any freelance, whether she be a plumber or a podiatrist – is predicated on willpower. Without it there simply wouldn’t be any remuneration, period.

So I was smacked up on the Prime Minister’s jet – big deal.

I’m an anarchist. I’m implacably opposed to heirarchical systems of power and control. I also mistrust crowds, as they often operate according to their lowest common denominator. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the crowd is very close to a herd of stampeding wildebeest.

What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence – gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim ‘You know exactly what I mean!’ depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.