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I grew up in a country where I remember my parents not being able to have a conversation on the phone. The walls had ears, and you couldn't speak freely.

The phone is one hundred, one hundred and ten years old. There was a middle period where the government had a broad ability to surveil, but if you look at human history in total, people evolved and civilizations evolved with private conversations and private speech.

My father, unusually for a PoW, talked about his experiences, but he talked about them in a very limited way.

When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.

I hate the amount of communication, the obligation that you have just by owning a phone.

When I was a kid trying to communicate with family in the Soviet Union, it was very difficult. You had to go through the long-distance phone companies like MCI, which were difficult to navigate and expensive to make calls through.

If, like Harry Keogh, I could talk to the dead - God, there are an awful lot of people I would like to speak to! Not least my father. Being in the army for 22 years, I didn't see enough of him, and I know there are a great many things I could have learned from him.

I never was for telephones. Just don't like them, that's all. Anybody wants to talk to you, they can come to see you.

Most people have to talk so they won't hear.

I stay away from the telephone if at all possible.