Why do you bother with such an insulting question? Obviously I don't think of my writing as 'onanism' - I suggest you retreat quietly to a corner where you can pull your plonker (or abrade your clitoris, should you be a female Stevie) in peace.

I've managed three years thus far, but my right hand has mutated into tongs...

I watched Wings of Desire which has a cameo appearance by Peter Falk only yesterday... I'm half a Jewish New Yorker which is a good start, but I find it difficult to suspend disbelief in the whole detective genre, because the usual plot motivator is that when the detective turns up, someone gets dead.

I've no idea if they ate toast, grapes, coffee and orange juice before the Flood - but somehow I doubt it....

The obscure words are there for all sorts of reasons - usually humorous ones. Orwell had many virtues as a writer, but humour was conspicuously lacking from his oeuvre....

No, but I think I could probably sodomise Ned Beatty while playing the banjo....

I certainly think that now copyright is in decline patronage should come in to support artists of all forms - I look to the rich for patronage, and if I see anyone I know who has a lot of money I never fail to ask them to cover this or that utility bill. I carry the bills with me to make it simpler for them to oblige...

Not as such, but on that question I'll allow myself the luxury of doubt... A personal afterlife - let alone immortality - would strike me as a cosmic solecism on a par with the hereditary monarchy...

South Mimms. I've fond memories of the time when it was the venue for large-scale ecstasy deals and the rendezvous for ravers... Excellent Harvester as well...

Lurch - for obvious reasons.

Well, it's gone now - the kids took it; but it wasn't a ginat Bourbon biscuit, it was a biscuit tin shaped like a giant Bourbon biscuit. No home should be without one - Baroness Warsi has several.

Well, I do think there is more and more call for writers to be able to read their own works aloud, and do it well. This is a function - in part - of the decline in revenue from the printed form, but also - I'm afraid to say - a function of readers no longer being inclined to give difficult texts the work they require. Your use of the word 'enjoyment' says it all - I'm not primarily trying to provide 'enjoyment', something I associate more with sexual pleasure than serious literature.

It's always the next book that I think will be the best - like a shark, I have to move forward... So, while I'm by no means dismissing 'Shark' or its predecessors, for me the third part of the Umbrella Trilogy will be the best. It's entitled 'Phone' and while only in an inchoate state, it shows remarkable vigour and strength....

I do think I probably began to use big words because I felt insecure, but now I use them because I know what they mean and I like them. The wind really changed a long time ago on this one, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to set the record straight (since my vocabulary seems to arouse such fury in you good folk); my first novel, 'My Idea of Fun' featured an outrageous and diabolic sesquipedalian called The Fat Controller; in devising the character - and providing him with dialogue - I massively increased my own word-power; it's a muscle I've continued to exercise ever since.

I like what the American writer Robert Stone said about hard drugs (and I would include hard liquor in this category): 'I admire them from afar'. Certainly we'll all be crying out for heroin on our death beds - and indeed that's the way the NHS likes to kill us: it's part of the so-called 'Liverpool Pathway'.

I'm asking myself that question right now - it's a pity you don't have direct access to my consciousness, or you'd know both the question and my reply...

I think you'll find a very satisfying caesarian-section-mediated-through-a-scene-from-Stephen-Spielberg's-Jaws episode in my latest offering - self-censorship is never anything I would practice, anymore than I would disavow anything I've written in the past....

On balance I think water wins out - I like the sparkling variety, preferably Perrier because it's the only naturally carbonated one. All other fancy non-alcoholic beverages suffer from the problem that they're harder to source than alcoholic ones, and asking for them draws the booze hounds' attention to the fact that you aren't drinking - and they don't like that, especially as they drink more, their forebrains begin to fall asleep, and they become disinhibited...

I'm both a son of fun and a daughter of darkness - Cocteau said that all true artists are hermaphrodites because they're engaged in acts of pathenogenesis.

It's a paradox really - all art (even the crap) effects some change in the world, but art that is entered into with that agenda usually collapses into didacticism. It's the same with art that is undertaken as 'therapy' - catharsis can be a by-product of art, but never its central objective.

You should be patronised: you're a teenager. I'm unimpressed by your empirical sample of one, and equally unimpressed by the lack of attention you bestowed on my original Guardian essay - if you read it at all - because your question is answered in full by it. Carry on fulminating.

I certainly think the left should seriously address the democratic deficit in the European Union as currently constituted - Nigel Farage (red of face, pointy of ear, no idea if his feet are cloven) shouldn't have all the good tunes...

I've no idea, I've only ever seen her on a television set.

The minimum standard of reality is functionality - as long as you can walk upright, wipe your arse and feed yourself (or, if you're disabled, have someone else to do these for you), then you can be free to fantasise, hallucinate or otherwise trip-out as much as you want.

Idon't know about 'Anglophile' - I presume you mean 'Anglophone'; but I would argue that novvels of the kind written by Robert Musil, Thomas Bernharrd, Marcel Proust and many other are equally under threat. As I said in the original piece for the Guardian to which you refer, in order to believe in the survival of prose narratives that require undivided attention and goodconcentration for extended periods of time you have to believe that people reading on internet-equipped devices will voluntarily switch off that conneection. I don't believe this will happed, QED that kind of reading will necessarily decline.

'Humanity' is a construct like any other - and not a discrete or homogenous entity. So, it's difficult to know what these 'gifts' are you refer to. I expectyou have self-consciousness or sentience in mind, but as an adherent of the 'hard zombie' theeory of mind I don't believe that consciousness is at all significant: it's perfectly possible to imagine human civilisation as it is, but peopled entirely by non-sentient beings such as Simon Pegg and the tubby one....

I am your life mentor already - I am the still and silent voice you hear muttering evil things at 3.00 am; I am the hortatory, steroid-pumped personal trainer who driives you from under the duvet at the very crack of dawn; I am the motivational speaker who drives you into a coma during the afternoon meeting; I am the fitness instructor who kicks and punches you into the raft that then disappears into a maelstrom of white water... Be careful what you wish for...

Well, was it Nietzsche who said that in illneess is the beginning of all psychology? I think so... anyway, our own age exhibits such a florid concern with illness - and by extension psychology - that I thinbk we can say that the notion of the autonomous moral subject has itsely become sick...