GD (Continued): From being all washed up and finished.  I’ve always felt that I’ve written my last book and that I’m not going to be able to write another book. It’s a constant with me. I can’t do it anymore.  It’s the thing that’s kept me going all these years. 

MC:  How has that kept you going? 

GD: It’s a paradox.

MC: When you meet the Buddha, kill him?

GD: What does one hand clapping sound like?

MC: Talk to me about morons.  In Zona, ostensibly about Tarkovsky’s film, Stalker, you write, “As we move away from Tarkovsky-time to moron time…” and then, “It’s not as Stalker claimed that all the world’s a prison, it’s just that a lot of what’s on TV, movies, computer screens is only fit for morons.”  It sounds like my grandfather, whom I’ve never met, saying, when I was your age, we had to crank our own radios…

GD: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve reached the age now where I can say that.

MC: It feels like a wink to the audience about a club that they belong to, the perhaps moronic sounding, Non-Moron Club.

GD: One of the things I really like about Zona, that I got from Roberto Calasso, who I was hanging out with on Monday night, is that straight off, with no introduction, you’re there, and you have to work out what kind of book you’re reading. You can’t know what to expect.  All you’ve got to go on at the beginning is the cover and the blurb and then we just get going straight away. One of the nicest things anybody’s said about my writing was in that Zadie Smith review of Otherwise Known as the Human Condition—she talked about the classlessness of my writing. Style isn’t just some lick of paint; style is integral to the thing.