Where are you happiest?

In the deserts, in the North Australian landscape, where a wordless calm comes down.

Which human quality do you most admire?

Courage.

Where would you like to have been born?

I have no problem with my actual birthplace: it’s seen things – a sanatorium in lower Manhattan, demolished a long while back and replaced with a big pair of towers, the World Trade Center, which I never set foot in while I lived in New York. Then came 9/11 – and on that day a beautiful piece of music was being prepared, just across the water: ‘The Disintegration Loops’, by ambient composer William Basinski. He was transferring his old tape recordings to new media on the roof of his house in Brooklyn when the planes hit: the tapes were decomposing on the playback: the recording is their tearing apart. That soundtrack means a great deal to me now.

What is your favourite book?

For its voice, its carousel ride of adventures, its rigour, and its charm, for the totality of the world it creates, for its tone of tormented retrospect, and for a hundred other things that rest in its pages, written in the murk of a library in far north-western Bohemia – Casanova’s History of My Life.

Who is your favourite author?

This feels like unfairly singling out one from a throng of guests at a wondrous costume dance. Poetry is the summit: I might choose Keats. Port Keats near Darwin brings him to mind.

And your favourite literary hero and heroine?

I have a weakness for Fabricedel Dongo in The Charterhouse of Parma.

How old were you when your first book appeared?

Thirty.

Of which of your books are you fondest?

They travel away from you; you send them away – but they are your best self. They are the emissary tablets of your being. It would be somehow improper to be fond of such things.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Laziness, usually masked as busyness, with its hooded companions close by: fear and fantasy.

How do you regard publishers?

With gratitude.

What do you think of the state of criticism?

Academic, caught up in the passing culture, far from life.

If you had your time over again, would you choose to be a writer?

Maybe that time already came and I lived it already: at any rate, I see no choice.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

Writing is not a social activity; an individual is not the same as an author of that name. The book is what matters. The only straight thing to do in such affairs, really, is read from one’s work.

Do you feel artists are valued in our society?

Not greatly, and not as they once were. One writes for the friend in the future; the reader to come, who might give our words new life.

What are you working on now?

A study of the landscapes of the north, and what lies behind them.