It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.

When a book comes from the publisher and you see it for the first time... Of course it's not remotely like seeing a baby for the first time, but I can remember with each book what room I was in when I opened it. That would be excitement, though, I think. Not pride.

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

John McGovern taught me that it's OK to write repeatedly about the same things.

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

I was first in Sydney in 1993, and have been a few times since then. For someone who didn't know Australia, it came as a shock how intelligent, interesting and funny the people were. If I lived there I might see it differently, but as a visitor it was a lot of fun.