I think [imagination] very austere element of Buddhism is also linked with a strong antinatalist strain in the philosophy. The Buddha was enlightened….

The urban, on the other hand, is often seen as more real and mundane, even though it is obviously far more recent in terms of planetary development. ….

[Someone] said that what I described as the Buddhist voice - the life-denying voice of censure and guilt - sounded to him very much like a Catholic v….

I suppose what I can say is that I do feel I have a natural spiritual sensibility..

You might call this innocence. I had a sense of another world that had not been spoken of to me..

It's interesting, the sense of pastoral utopia that exists in so much fantasy - in [Edward ] Dunsany, [John R.R.] Tolkien and so on..

1977 was also, of course, the year that Derek Jarman made his iconoclastic film Jubilee, which was so much part of the punk movement..

Speaking of [Philip] Larkin, in his poem about the First World War he wrote something like, "Never such innocence, before or since, that turned itsel….

My muse can take the form of a landscape, an era, a style of writing, a piece of music, and, perhaps that which I find strangest of all for a muse, a….

If we do overcome linear time, I would hope this means dwelling more directly in the fertility of the imagination rather than denying it, as some asp….

I'm constantly struggling with the futility and even sinfulness, from an antinatalist point of view, of creativity. And that struggle itself seems pa….

I seemed to recall some words from an old Zen master, something like, "My Zen cuts down mountains." My rejection of Buddhism was a cutting down of mo….

You focus on the here and now in order to escape existence forever and vanish into Nirvana. There is another religious impulse that is the opposite o….

I think I still have [commemorative coin ] somewhere. Why was this given to me? I think every child in the country must have received one [ from Quee….

[My muse] is, in fact, a woman of the world, and precisely because of this, hopes that a diversity of cultures will endure, and that one bland monocu….

More or less the first thing that comes into my head is that some people are always looking for what they want to do in life and never finding it. I'….

I'm not an expert here. I'm talking about an experience I had rather than something I intellectually worked out. From what I can gather, the original….

As children in the seventies we were told about nebulous 'strangers'. By definition, we didn't know who these strangers were, and we didn't know what….

In the meditation, of course, the question is repeated and repeated until you run out of answers - or so I hear..

This is part of the fundamental character of Buddhism that I find problematic - that it is not interested in anything. Hence the 'Fascination' in the….

Some people have described Daoism as pantheist, and although there's something in me that resists this designation, I can see that Daoism is consiste….