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[...] The girl would have been, I don’t know, I can never tell how old people are, but I think she would have been between fourteen and sixteen years old. And yet she behaved as if she were younger, with that stiffness, that dependence on the old lady still rooting around in her handbag. The girl h…

I lit the end of a candle, left over from a previous power cut, and stuck it in a clean ashtray. I carried the lit candle to the bathroom, resigned to facing the second phase of my martyrdom – damn those antidepressants – while trying to shake from my mind the uncomfortable notion that I was fallin…

When I ‘steal’ a program I’m exercising my right to culture, which isn’t anyone’s private property. The programs I ‘steal’ don’t earn me any money; on the contrary, they make me waste time. I don’t derive any material benefit from them. Culture, the product of intelligence and sensibility, is somet…

I think I’m not strictly a thief; I don’t have the right mindset for it. So why do I steal programs?

In response to that, I’d say that I don’t steal programs, but rather the right to use them. The program isn’t a physical thing; it’s information, a kind of information, just as one of my novels i…

The manufacturer was a Texan man, and he turned out not to be particularly nice. I wrote him a very interesting, entertaining, agreeable email, explaining the difficulties I had in getting to the post office because of my advanced years, and how people here steal any money you post anyway, and how …