Very few people are willing to say: I’m nobody, or what I am is not in any way fixed from moment to moment. It’s a very stressful idea.

My own feeling is that the current climate of mass communication is so Orwellian, you have to find some other way of broadening the bandwidth. Debate mode will never do anything other than short-circuit any attempts to achieve a sane perspective. Maybe we have to go into the imaginative space of fiction, whether in literature or film, to do the work of exploration more freely.

The classic struggle: of course the writer is alone. It’s voluntary house arrest. Cocteau said you can never be alone enough – his fantasy being some basement where people would leave the food outside the door.

And you find the book, you get the rights, you publish the book, it’s a great book, and no attention whatsoever is paid to it, absolutely no attention. And you realise that that’s what we’re there for, to publish. This is our great deficit, and also our great virtue, the fact that we’re willing to continue to be foolish and impractical.

I failed at prose. When I was seventeen, eighteen, like any sensible person, I tried to write ‘stories’, but I got nowhere with them, partly because they were too unhealthily interested in language. They were these introspective slabs of consciousness, and even then I couldn’t break the half-page barrier.

Imre Salusinszky and Stephen Mills, interviewed Richard Ford for HEAT when he visited Sydney in March, 2000.