One senses that he's tired of this literalism, which has dogged him since he first started writing, and which reached its apotheosis with Crash . I'm not interested in cars at all . But I am interested in the psychology of the car user, the car as a facilitator of latent psychopathy or of the latent imagination for good. I think that a lot of people do express their imaginations through the cars they own. Imaginations they wouldn't be able to express in other ways.
Cars are a hugely liberating force in all kinds of ways.
I don't agree with the Reclaim the Streets people at all. I think that the recent petrol tanker blockades across the country illustrates how silly it is to talk about the end of the car age. When the fuel crisis was at its worst there was the very real possibility that there would be thousands and thousands of abandoned cars on motorway flyovers and cloverleaf intersections. And this recent prediction that a giant tsunami is going to swallow the east coast of America. All very Ballardian.