I Suspect That Many Of The Great

I Came To Live In Shepperton In 1960. I Thought: The Future Isn't In The Metropolitan Areas Of London. I Want To Go Out To The New Suburbs, Near The Film Studios. This Was The England I Wanted To Write About, Because This Was The New World That Was Emerging.

I Believe In The Power Of The Imagination To Remake The World, To Release The Truth Within Us, To Hold Back The Night, To Transcend Death, To Charm Motorways, To Ingratiate Ourselves With Birds, To Enlist The Confidences Of Madmen.

I Define Inner Space As An Imaginary Realm In Which On The One Hand The Outer World Of Reality, And On The Other The Inner World Of The Mind Meet And Merge. Now, In The Landscapes Of The Surrealist Painters, For Example, One Sees The Regions Of Inner Space; And Increasingly I Believe That We Will Encounter In Film And Literature Scenes Which Are Neither Solely Realistic Nor Fantastic. In A Sense, It Will Be A Movement In The Interzone Between Both Spheres.

I Don't Think Any Particular Painters Have Inspired Me, Except In A General Sense. It Was More A Matter Of Corroboration. The Visual Arts, From Manet Onwards, Seemed Far More Open To Change And Experiment Than The Novel, Though That's Only Partly The Fault Of The Writers. There's Something About The Novel That Resists Innovation.

Everything Is Becoming Science Fiction. From The Margins Of An Almost Invisible Literature Has Sprung The Intact Reality Of The 20th Century.