When you start off with your first book, people assume that you're like all the characters in the book - and it does complicate things, when you're being constantly bombarded with it, but you have to embrace it.

Are you asking me or telling me?

Sometimes ah think that people become junkies just because they subconsciously crave a wee bit ay silence.

Conservatives are giving up on democracy because it's not efficient. They want an autocratic regime.

You write people as human beings first and then the gender specific stuff second.

I'm quite comfortable now with being misunderstood. I don't really feel the need either to pander to it or to refute it. Just go on, and do what I've got to do.

We have to concentrate back on: Where is the money going? Where's it been going for the last thirty years? How do we start to redistribute the cake more evenly, and give people opportunities? That's as much about poor white people in West Virginia as it is about poor black people on the Southside of Chicago.