Newcastle University

So what would you say that reading gives you?

I think in a way, I don’t know whether it’s a question of age or not, it becomes more relevant than the immediate world around you. You know, the tap’s dripping, is this a major problem for you? Do you spend hours thinking about ‘oh God, the tap’s dripping’? It’s irrelevant. I think by, perhaps the word is even retreating into literature, which as I say you can do when you’ve got a range of authors and characters. You think, ‘oh, I’ll go and,’ just as I’m talking to you, ‘I’ll just go and join Valieska Piontek [sp?] in 1945, on the 13 February in Dresden as the bombs came down’. I can go and join her. It’s harrowing, but it takes you totally out of the trivial, boring, mundane problems of, you know, eating three meals a day and cleaning your teeth, and putting the cat out. So I think it becomes more relevant, perhaps, as you get older. Perhaps people, friendships, become less important. […] You find yourself if a bit of a vacuum. It’s not that I’m conscious of it, it just becomes more and more attractive to spend your time with imaginary characters who become more real than real people. Sad in a way, isn’t it? […] So, again, it gives you an escape. I’m not bothered about escaping, but you don’t want to be spending the latter years of your life worrying about the colour of the wallpaper, or is there enough toilet paper. I mean you do, you’ve got to give up time to keep body and soul together, you’ve got to eat, wash and dress and all the rest, and yet that’s irrelevant. Well, to me. And I suppose it depends on the type of character you are. Maybe it’s just a type of consumerism. Some people consume alcohol, or stuff themselves with food, or buy twenty million pairs of shoes – maybe it’s consumerism, another type. Maybe it’s just greed, when you read and read. It’s not to show off, because I don’t discuss books with people particularly. I think it becomes a more comfortable, safe world than the real world. […] I think you get a body, a corpus of books or music, if you’re into music, which you return to perhaps more and more, partly because they’re familiar, maybe because they’re easy – you know what’s coming. So you don’t always feel the need to discover something new, and anyway I don’t really believe there is anything new. It’s said in a different way – I don’t know if there’s anything new that hasn’t been said in a form before. […] I think you’ve got a big enough bank of material, which for me is perhaps enough. I hope not, because obviously I do try to discover new things, but it wouldn’t matter because you’re only doing it for yourself, and again, it doesn’t matter. You’re trying to enrich yourself, not to show how good you are, how well read, because, well, nobody cares, and you don’t care really. It’s just as time is, well, not running out, but you know what I mean, one is not here forever, but these characters … Perhaps it’s a world, a safe secure world – although you can be reading about the most distressing events, of course, but nevertheless, you know what it is, and you can retreat into it.