I Felt Slightly Superior To Student Politics,

And If These Incidents Now Seem Full Of Significance And All Of A Piece, It's Probably Because I'm Looking At Them In The Light Of What Came Later.

Everything Might Scatter. You Might Be Right. I Suppose It's Something We Can't Easily Get Away From. People Need To Feel They Belong. To A Nation, To A Race. Otherwise, Who Knows What Might Happen? This Civilisation Of Ours, Perhaps It'll Just Collapse. And Everything Scatter, As You Put It.

I Want My Words To Survive Translation. I Know When I Write A Book Now I Will Have To Go And Spend Three Days Being Intensely Interrogated By Journalists In Denmark Or Wherever. That Fact, I Believe, Informs The Way I Write - With Those Danish Journalists Leaning Over My Shoulder.

When You Become A Parent, Or A Teacher, You Turn Into A Manager Of This Whole System. You Become The Person Controlling The Bubble Of Innocence Around A Child, Regulating It.

When I Got To 40 Or So... I Had The Sense When I Looked Back Over My Life I Would Actually See A Mess Of Decisions, A Few Of Which I Had Thought About, Some Of Which I Had Sort Of Stumbled On, And Many That I Had No Control Over Whatsoever.