I’m so revolted by writers taking themselves seriously that, as a kind of protest, I’ve deprioritized the role of writing in my life. I do it when I’ve not got anything better to do – and even then I often do nothing instead.

These days any self-respecting exhibition of nude photos has to have pornographically explicit images to prove that they are works of art.

Foreign governments are going to be poring through all these Donald Trump tweets looking for - to try and discern what it means for foreign policy.

I guess that as life is speeded up and our capacity for concentration is being nibbled away at by all the obvious things, that leads us actually to be more susceptible to boredom.

The thing that strikes me, from looking at the names so far in the Donald Trump's Cabinet on the foreign policy side, is the one thing that unites them - and that's General James Mattis at the Pentagon, Mike Pompeo at the CIA, even Mitt Romney to become secretary of state - they're all very, very hawkish on Iran.

Getting too much money too soon can be really bad. There's a balance to be kept - the right balance between new experience and a certain stability in one's life. I'm conscious of all these things in a way that, earlier on, I was only conscious of circumstantial stuff, like, money.

Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.