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Back in the early sixties, when I first started out, insolvency spelt glamour. It was OK to be broke – more than OK, since money was well-known to be the super-foe of books. It was Mammon v. the Muses: take your pick. In those days, if a writer owned up to caring about money, he was instantly brand…

In the Cambridge market square, there was an old brass fountain, tarnished with age and gummed up with drinking straws and cigarette butts and always smelling of urine. Drunks lolled on its steps, cradling tins of Carlsberg Special Brew or bottles of Anglia Sherry. The story was that one of them wa…

I had in fact stolen my first book when I was fourteen–a paperback edition of Dracula; the second was Nik Cohn’s Awopbopaloobopalapbamboom, the Paladin edition, a lovely thing with a Guy Peellart illustration of Elvis on the jacket. But now I couldn’t be stopped. I stole a first edition of Scoop–Wa…

In fact the trouble I was having with ethics was that I’d never thought about them before–in any sense. I had opinions on almost every subject, could argue any position and believed in almost nothing. I grew up, not necessarily with the belief, but with the feeling powerfully impressed on me, that …

There’s a real closeness between imagination and forgiveness. I mean that in a phenomenological way. If you notice where you go when you have to forgive someone, it’s the place of supply, the place of extra. I think it’s worth spending a lot of time attending to that, so that when chance or fate or…