Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.

Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon. How do you surmount reality, children? How do you acquire, in a flat country, the tonic of elevated feelings?

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.

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

My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer's upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite.

If people read 'Tomorrow' and feel that it is offering them some view of my own household, they would be very, very wrong.

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