I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst..

After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident..

'What was being on the moon literally like?' [. . .] 'Being on the moon?' His tired gaze inspected the narrow street of cheap jewellery stores, with ….

There is a British pop group called God. At a recent book signing the lead singer introduced himself and gave me a cassette. I have heard the voice o….

Hell is out of fashion - institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the b….

Most writers flinch at the thought of being completely honest about themselves. So absolute honesty is what marks the true modern..

Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on ….

All through my career I've written 1,000 words a day - even if I've got a hangover. You've got to discipline yourself if you're professional. There's….

I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means..

His mother and father were agnostics, and Jim respected devout Christians in the same way that he respected people who were members of the Graf Zeppe….

People think that by living on some mountainside in a tent and being frozen to death by freezing rain, they're somehow discovering reality, but of co….

The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this ….

It was an excess of fantasy that killed the old United States, the whole Mickey Mouse and Marilyn thing, the most brilliant technologies devoted to t….

Burroughs called his greatest novel Naked Lunch, by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. He's a writer of enormous richness whose b….

Films, like memories, seem to re-shoot themselves over the years, reflecting our latest needs and obsessions. In many cases they can change completel….

The technological landscape of the present day has enfranchised its own electorates - the inhabitants of the marketing zones in the consumer society,….

Human beings today are surrounded by huge institutions we can never penetrate: the City, the banking system, political and advertising conglomerates,….

If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach sp….

I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic..

Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I'm intensely interested in change - proba….

The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications ….