GEOFF DYER  It probably coincided with a sense of moving towards the twilight of my own creative life. To my astonishment, I was no longer 25. As in the Talking Heads’ song, it came as a great surprise to me, as it does to everyone. I was conscious of it proceeding in tandem with a sense of biological aging. But I was also conscious of having been interested in things ending from a surprisingly early stage. These manifestations make themselves felt sooner than one might think, which is why I thought it was nice to start the book with The Doors’ song, The End. As I say in the book, this was the last song on their first album. I also mention the experience that I had when I was 12, of one of the world’s greatest footballers, George Best, retiring when he was still close to his peak.

GD  It is a very important distinction, because there has been much talk of late style. This idea of late style has almost become an academic cliché. Beethoven is the classic example of somebody who very definitely had a late style, which is also his last style. Nobody would dissent from that. On the other hand, Beethoven’s last works seem to bring everything to some sort of conclusion. It is hard to imagine that he could have pushed things much further. When we listen to those late quartets, even now, they still blow our minds with how far out they are. But we can think of all sorts of examples of people whose last works, for whatever reason, came when they were really in what should have been their middle years. This happened with John Coltrane and Garry Winogrand. For both, the last works were in the midst of a transitional phase. You get the sense that there was plenty more to come. As we move the clock earlier on into people’s lives, we can think of many people whose last works are synonymous not with their late works, but with their first works, novelists who, for whatever reason, gave up after one book.

GD  I’m so glad you say that. I’m convinced that I’m getting funnier as a writer as I get older. That Said book was a great disappointment to me. It was an unfinished book, as he became ill himself, which is not his fault, but it seemed to me that the best bits of that book were when he did a synoptic appraisal of what Adorno had said. One of the things that I talk about in the book is when to embark on this discussion of lastness or lateness. Maybe Said just left that a little bit too late. But I should say that I never was besotted by Said in the way that some people are. He remained for me somebody who always sounded like an academic. I never fell for him the way that I did for other writers.

GD  I was conscious of what you just said as well. But it has slightly changed now. The athletes are not drinking or taking drugs in the way that McEnroe and his friends used to. They can play into their late 30s. I used to see the life of an athlete as the best possible life, as it came to an end typically at about 30 – in other words, at the age that, typically, somebody publishes their first novel. It seemed to me that it could be the most glorious life: devoting yourself first to athletics and then to writing. I have a friend who was a pro surfer. It sounded amazing: going around the world, getting drunk and stoned with his friends, trying to fight off all the women who wanted to sleep with him. He looks back on that now and says it was fun, but that he should have written more. I always think: every writer that I know would have loved to have changed lives with you! The interesting thing about Federer is that, first of all, he had a very long twilight. There was so much talk about when he was going to retire. Maybe tennis is special in this regard. All that most footballers want is to keep playing for as long as they can. They love it. But tennis has driven some people nuts. André Agassi famously said that he came to hate tennis. But Federer seemed to like playing tennis, even if that meant playing when he was no longer going to win anything. And then came that lovely thing whereby, after we all assumed that he was never going to win anything again, he wins a further three Grand Slams. One of the reasons the book has his name in the title is because of that idea: why should you give up doing something if you really love every aspect of it, even if you are not going to be doing it at your peak? This overlaps with writers continuing even though the time of their best work might be behind them. That continues to interest me. I have been reading a biography of Walt Whitman, stressing how he went on revising and adding to Leaves of Grass for ages. But the period of his greatest creativity was compacted into less than a decade.