Standards Are Always Out Of Date. That's

Kafka Could Never Have Written As He Did Had He Lived In A House. His Writing Is That Of Someone Whose Whole Life Was Spent In Apartments, With Lifts, Stairwells, Muffled Voices Behind Closed Doors, And Sounds Through Walls. Put Him In A Nice Detached Villa And He'd Never Have Written A Word.

But Most Men Regard Their Life As A Poem That Women Threaten. They May Not Have Two Spondees To Rub Together But They Still Want To Pen Their Saga Untrammelled By Life-threatening Activities Like Trailing Round Sainsbury's, Emptying The Dishwasher Or Going To The Nativity Play.

It [cambridge] Wasn't A Holy Grail In The Sense That I'd Never Been To Cambridge. But Then, When I Did Go, The Contrast Between Leeds, Which Was Very Black And Sooty In Those Days, And Cambridge, Which Seemed Like Something Out Of A Fairystory, In The Grip Of A Hard Frost, Was Just Wonderful.

You Always Know When You're Going To Arrive. If You Go By Car, You Don't. Apart From Anything Else, I Prefer Cycling. It Puts You In A Good Mood, I Find.

I Don't Talk Very Well. With Writing, You've Time To Get It Right. Also I've Found The More I Talk The Less I Write, And If I Didn't Write No One Would Want Me To Talk Anyway.