No Pain Is Too Small

Well, The Attractive Thing About The Subject Of Happiness Is That It Is Notoriously Difficult To Write.

Irony Is The Hardest Addiction Of All. Forget Heroin. Just Try Giving Up Irony, The Deep-down Need To Mean Two Things At Once, To Be In Two Places At Once, Not To Be There For The Catastrophe Of A Fixed Meaning.

Proust Is A Hero Of Mine. I Read 'a La Recherche' In One Go, And I'm A Very Slow Reader. It Had An Astonishing Impact, Reading It On My Own And Being My Main Company. I Think Proust Is The Most Intelligent Person To Ever Have Written A Novel.

The Booker 2011 Is Of No More Interest To Me Than The World Heavyweight Championship, Which I'm Not Going To Win Either. It's Irrelevant.

I See The Author As The Person Who Has Written; The Writer, The One Involved In The Process Of Writing. And They're Not Necessarily Friends. The Writer Is The One I Want To Reinforce; The Author Would Just Feed On The Reviews - So I'm In Favour Of Starving Him.