Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

When I began to write seriously, 40 years ago now, my chosen form was the novel.

Madly, futilely, I wrote novel after novel, eight in all, that failed to find a publisher. I persisted because for me the novel was the supreme literary form - not just one among many, not a relic of the past, but the way we communicate to one another the subtlest truths about this business of living.

Why should I be honored? Don't I have enough attention, comfort and power already?

There is this notion that the lives of the comfortable-off middle class don't merit being treated seriously and with compassion.

A well-off plastic surgeon can suffer just as much as an Irish lad who has been abused or whatever.