I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the first book had not sold... doesn't bear thinking about, but I suppose we'd have made it work somehow.

You know what circumcision is, Private?

What I mean by that is that the point of life, as I see it, is not to write books or scale mountains or sail oceans, but to achieve happiness, and preferably an unselfish happiness.

We don't build,' I said to my son, 'we just destroy.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the first book had not sold... doesn't bear thinking about, but I suppose we'd have made it work somehow.

I'll happily mentor anyone who wants mentoring, and most of that goes on by internet rather than face to face.

Book tours and research provide a lot of travel - too much, I sometimes think, but we do take vacations.