We still go to nonfiction for content. And if it's well-written, that's a bonus. But we don't often talk about the nonfiction work of art. That's what I'm very interested in.
For me, those little cinemas in Paris where I saw many art films for the first time meant that cinema became a kind of pilgrimage site.
I first got a sense of that idea of nodality - but I didn't use the word back then - with 'The Missing of the Somme': that sense of a particular place in a landscape or on a map having some kind of tremendous power to draw us to itself... that made me conscious, and since then, really, it has been an abiding concern of mine.
I would probably, in my 60s, be ready to start having kids, as long as I was spared all the stuff about it that doesn't appeal to me. By then, I'd have lost interest in practically everything, so there'd be no opportunity cost involved.
One of my great heroes, John Berger, he's in his 80s now. One of the reasons that he's remained young and all-around fantastic is his ongoing receptivity to new things. I think that's important.
Despite what Wordsworth says about thoughts that 'lie too deep for tears', I think tears are a pretty reliable indication of being in the grips of a profound experience.
I am still moved by passages of Marx: the 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,' for example, where, after the famous line about religion being 'the opium of the people,' he goes on to call it 'the heart of a heartless world.'
Contrary to popular belief, Oxford has the highest concentration of dull-witted, stupid, narrow-minded people anywhere in the British Isles.
I think I got into travelling because it was so not in my blood, so against my tendency to just stay put because my dad just hated going on holidays, because, as I've said in many essays, the thing that he hated more than anything else in life was spending money. And as soon as you leave your home, you're spending money.
First, unreliability is not the sole preserve of fictional narrators. Second, the pleasure of patting oneself on the back for seizing on instances of unreliability and ignorance is, as the late Frank Kermode may or may not have pointed out, considerable.
Practically everyone I know now is from a middle- or upper-middle-class background, and I no longer have the huge chip on my shoulder that I carried around for so many years. I'm not sure it comes out much in the work, but coming from this kind of background is absolutely central to my identity, to my sense of who I am.
Inevitably, most readers come to John Cheever's 'Journals' via his fiction. Whatever value they might have in their own right, their viability as a publishing proposition was conditional on the interest of the large readership of his novels and stories.
The CGI landscape is another world. It has its own physical laws; it can defy gravity. But surely the wonder of cinematic space is that it is wedded to reality?
The essence of my character is an inability to get used to things. This, in fact, is the one thing I have grown accustomed to: an inability to get used to things.