prospect of dying in penniless obscurity. In short I feel faintly ashamed that this sort of thing counts as an important inspiration rather than finishing reading a particularly good book. I suppose I am finishing good books all the time (as well as some pretty second rate ones - which in itself provides a strange cocktail of despair and inspiration). But the truth is, just as unpublished or unsuccessful authors entertain the notion of adulation in their idle daydreams, so the established and successful enjoy their moments in the sun.

Back in Cannes, I was starting to get annoyed with that photographer who was following the three of us around, impelling us to stop every five yards on the pavement so he can take pictures of the glamorous girl accompanying us. Eventually we stopped all the stopping and pushed on through. For a laugh, I started pretending to be security for the 'famous' couple, moving the photographers aside with a gentle movement of my hand. Eventually even that got boring. We all knew we were not really famous, and we knew that the photographers were just trying to make money out of us. But in the end what's the difference between that and them trying to get money out of someone else for pictures of the real celebrities? And the celebs don't even get exclusive copies of the photos without buying up every single copy of Hello! magazine. The point is, I could begin to see, after the initial excitement had worn off, how easily being famous could really begin to get on your nerves if you couldn't even go out to your local drug dealer for your daily bin-bag of cocaine without being pounced upon by rows of camera-wielding media- paths.

Much as Amis was enjoying himself, and much as we were all enjoying Amis, he wouldn't want to be in that package all the time. He might start thinking that endless rounds of talks, public appearances, book-signings, competing on Literary Big Brother and so on might start to get in the way of actually writing books. And Amis is hardly an example of the pinnacle of novelist celebrity. There are a dozen more writers more paparazzi-philic than him, more likely to give film cameos, more likely to turn up on Have I Got News For You. Some authors manage to totally transcend their books. No-one I know has actually read anything longer than a magazine article by Will Self, but I'm always glad to see him on my television screen, or hear him on my radio. In a sense, just as Tracy Emin herself is the piece of modern art, so Self is the piece of literature.

But would we be happy with an Amis or a Rushdie or a Rowling packaged in that way all the time? I suspect, too much so. Occasionally we might just start thinking that we'd kind of like to read one of their books. But these days, we don't really have time to be reading books. After all, the Guardian "Editor" supplement helpfully provides us with a half-page condensation of the most prominent new books by the most prominent authors. So perhaps we might be happier if our authors didn't actually write books, they just occasionally appeared on the television or radio and gave us enough information to give us the gist of what they were trying to say. Certainly once their actual authorship had secured a certain level of renown, we could relax and trust that their easily-digestible oratory was along the lines and of the quality that we would expect from them.

A year after Amis, I was back at Hay, listening to Jeanette Winterson who had been given the task of addressing the 'keynote' topic of 'What is Art For? - an impossibly broad topic if ever there was one. But Winterson was typically undaunted. She rattled through her talk and got all the right noises back from the audience. But would the reception have been as warm, the applause so prolonged, and the laughter so loud if a complete nobody had stood up there and delivered the cascade of platitudes that Winterson regaled the audience with? I don't know, but I suspect not. Admittedly they were convincingly and enthusiastically stated platitudes, peppered with entertaining anecdotes and the odd wry comment, but a platitude is a platitude (he says platitudinously). But as I write this, I almost feel guilty at having a go at a widely enjoyed speech, because I think, "who am I to criticise Winterson. I've not had all those successful books published, nor made a healthy living out of being a writer." But I shouldn't. A critic may indeed be a man without legs who teaches running, someone who knows the directions but cannot drive, and so on, but if persona is key then there is that danger that we elevate the renown of the author above the veracity, quality, importance and so on of what they are saying or writing about. And as the bookshelves of Waterstones are crowded with more and more copies of the same book at the expense of a variety of