I hate it when I'm reading a comic, and the dialogue looks like stickers stuck on top to explain what's going on. For me the best is when your eye goes in a certain point and moves through the composition and then springs out on the dialogue, or gets confused in the image and then goes to the dialogue for an explanation.

We don't really go in for big family dinners, but Scottish people are famously confrontational. It's a cultural thing, so maybe we don't need to have them to clear the air. Also, traditional family food isn't as nice here so there's no payoff for traveling hundreds of miles.

I'm always represented as a bit of a class warrior - a bit Down With Men and Down With Middle-Class People. Whereas I'm actually very fond of men and am middle-class. I even went to boarding school in Perthshire.

I think the negative traits are what makes us love other human beings, the foibles and the flaws.

Most of the people who write to me are really clever, really engaged. They just want to say that they have read my book and liked it.

I have two children. They are more fun than anything in the world, and it's more immediate fun than the hard slog of writing.

Novelisation doesn't imply the truth. Readers are sophisticated enough to know that.