I like the world we've got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.

I like the world we've got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.

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.

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

I am struck by the way people behave on the Tube. They look at each other beadily and inquisitively, and something goes on in their thoughts which must be equivalent to the way dogs and other animals, when they meet, sniff each other's arses and nuzzle each other's fur.

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.

I had a fear of becoming anything, a fear of becoming a specialist. I might have become a doctor, but if you become a doctor, that's your specialty in life and you are defined by it. One of the attractions of being a writer is that you're never a specialist. Your field is entirely open; your field is the entire human condition.