I think the purveyors of e-books are only too happy for this atmosphere of 'everything belongs to everybody' to increase because it means they don't have to think so much about the original maker of the thing, or they can get away with paying them less.

Of course there are times when I hate London, but equally there are times when I can walk 'round a corner and I really feel that this is my place.

Structure that really pays off is all based on emotion. I don't write down an elaborate plan. It's really done by feel. It's one area of my writing that I think I've got surer at as I've evolved. In my work you often get an abrupt shift in time, a jolt. But the emotional logic will take the reader on. I hope. I trust. After all, our memories do not work with any sequential logic.

What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.

Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself.

I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it.

Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.