Everything went, actually, pretty well in my life. I wrote several more movies. A lot of them didn't get made, but nobody seemed to mind because, funnily enough, in America they quite like my company. I amuse people in America and I'm more American. I do that. I'm quite a kind of chameleon figure in terms of taking on local colour. And it amuses me to be toffy with toffs and academic with academics and various other things.

I don't know where the years went. Sarah grew up, Paul grew up and Steve went to school in France. And we had a great time. All the time that there was a disaster with dreadful things like bell-bottom jeans and national catastrophes of that order in England, we were in France and Steve was at the local school and we led a very, very simple life and we were very happy. Sarah began to do very well with her work when she left Bedales. And she didn't do very well, she just was very good. And the years went by. And they do, don't they?

I don't know what my reputation was. I was told by somebody not long ago that I had made a mess of my career in the 1970s by leaving England after The Glittering Prizes. To which my honest answer is, I don't have a career. I didn't know that writers were supposed to be careerists. I thought they were supposed to write. I thought exactly the same thing then as I thought after I told the people at Macmillan that I didn't want to make friends with my work, and I think it now. I would like to be a very well selling writer and, like Henry James in the theatre, you know, I've done my best in the commercial world. Henry James was once asked why he thought he had not been a success in the theatre. And for once in his life he was very monosyllabic and he said, 'I don't know. I tried so hard to be base'.