I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

Everybody has basically the same family it's just reconfigured slightly differently from one to the next.

Even in a gleefully negative comic there is optimism although it's slightly hidden: It comes out through a comic character's sheer tenacity. He keeps going and trying to find some sort of fulfillment regardless of his perpetual failure record. That's a form of hope a form of optimism. Really hokey I know but it's true.

In Dreams... well I was slightly overcompensating with that. I was a bit like a director for hire so maybe I was putting too much imagery that was familiar to me into it.

Like many of you I've always been slightly obsessed with vampires dating back to the prime-time series 'Dark Shadows ' which I followed avidly as a kid.

Even if I tried to be my dad it would be a mediocre slightly embarrassing version.

Sometimes the other characters are too normal and then you start to be brought back to reality but then Luna shows up and she is just so funny and cool and honest and slightly mad and she's all that matters. She is 100% true. She puts on no shows because she is so comfortable with herself.

And in a world without heroes as the movie trailer voice-over guy might say the slightly awkward can be slightly cool.

The thing that I've always been slightly frustrated with was that the idea of a CD is kind of confined to a material possession that you can put on a shelf. And the idea of music for me is always about both the communication and the sharing of content. And so the interactive part is missing.

I had some vague memory of visiting Canberra as a lad when we came up with my father by car. But when I made the long train journey from Sydney to Canberra and arrived at the little stop I did wonder slightly whether this really was the national capital.

I mean you've kind of got the track down especially with ovals. The only thing that improves is that when race conditions come you know what to expect slightly more from the track and from your car.

I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they're trying to write about. They have music.

I don't think immortality is necessarily the key to understanding the world. You have to be careful with what you think you're achieving. I'm all for science discovering amazing and fantastic things about our world but I think the motivations behind it are slightly askew.

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family friends and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone uninterrupted and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.