Honor the miraculousness of the ordinary.

But I can't and don't ever want to write bell-yanking confetti-tossing hat-throwing poems.

I like eating out. I like buying beautiful paintings and being surrounded by beautiful things. I have to finance that life. I can barely afford a pension scheme because I don't make enough money.

I read ' Treasure Island' for the first time at university. And I started to notice then how unresolved some things were. Later, I realised that Stevenson was interested in sequels, and I wondered whether he would have gone back to it had he lived longer.

I get up at 5.30am, sluice myself and have two Weetabix and some mint tea, before starting to write by 6am.

I deeply adored my mum. She was an extraordinary person, even for the prejudice I'm likely to have. She was beautiful, amusing, a tremendous elaborator of things into comic proportions and extravagant in her imagination.

Like a lot of people, for a long time I thought that the road to hell is paved with bad sequels.