There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in evrything, everywhere we look.

It's about the connecting force from form to form. It's the toe bone connecting to the shoulder bone. It's the bacterial kick of life force, something growing out of nothing, forming itself out of something else. Form never stops. And form is always environmental.

You never know if you're a writer. You can't trust it. If you woke up and said, "I'm a writer," it would be gone. You wouldn't see anything for miles - even the dust would be running away.

My father is from Newark in Nottinghamshire and my mother is from the very north of Ireland. They've ended up in Scotland, where my father - well, both of them - will always be seen as having come from somewhere else.

Short stories consume you faster. They're connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they're also a total joy.

Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness.

I want to be bored. But I can't. But I really don't want to be this thing that I'm having to be instead of being bored.