‘Well it so happens that you of all people know almost exactly what it’s like – to be a writer. You’re in your early-middle teens. The age when you come into a new level of self-awareness. Or a new level of self-communion. It’s as if you hear a voice, which is you but doesn’t sound like you. Not quite – it isn’t what you’ve been used to, it sounds more articulate and discerning, more thoughtful and also more playful, more critical (and self-critical) and also more generous and forgiving. You like this advanced voice, and to maintain it you find yourself writing poems, you keep a diary perhaps, you start to fill a notebook. In welcome solitude you moon over your thoughts and feelings, and sometimes you moon over the thoughts and feelings of others. In solitude.

‘That’s the writer’s life. The aspiration starts now, at around fifteen, and if you become a writer your life never really changes. I’m still doing it half a century later, all day long. Writers are stalled adolescents, but contentedly stalled; they enjoy their house arrest…To you the world seems strange: the adult world that you’re now contemplating, with inevitable anxiety but still from a fairly safe distance. Like the stories Othello tells Desdemona, the stories that won her heart, the adult world seems “strange, passing strange”; it also seems “pitiful, wondrous pitiful”. A writer never moves on from that premise. Don’t forget that the adolescent is still a child; and a child sees things without presuppositions, and unreassured by experience.’