Iggy Pop looks right at me as he sings the line: 'America takes drugs in psychic defence'; only he changes 'America' to 'Scatlin', and defines us mair accurately in a single sentence than all the others have ever done.

If there's very strong civic unrest you can see a strong party of the Right emerging, whether it's UKIP [The UK Independence Party] or an even further-right party.

In the cross-over, you get to a point where you realize that you've got all this genetic inheritance, and you've got all this social conditioning, but there is a point where you do have to make a choice, and that's the optimist in me: you have the freedom to make a choice about how you are going to be, and what you're going to do.

You have to let people express themselves in the way that they need to express themselves. You have to express yourself in any way possible, provided you're prepared to live with the consequences.

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.

I can't really say - if I've run out of ideas until I've had my next set of ideas.

If it's something that I feel uncomfortable with, that's a reason for me to write it. I kind of like to make myself feel uncomfortable. I think if you're starting to feel uncomfortable with something when you're writing it, that's the reason really to push on with it.