I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.

I grew up in a place where everybody was a storyteller, but nobody wrote. It was that kind of Celtic, storytelling tradition: everybody would have a story at the pub or at parties, even at the clubs and raves.

There is a kind of mysticism to writing.

In some ways, you can say that at any time in any writer's career: 'He might have run out of ideas.'

I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.

The first time I went to West Virginia I was surprised by how poor it was. It was like north India, there's kids running around in bare feet. The white working class has been disenfranchised as well. It's been disenfranchised by the liberal-left as well as the conservative-right. You really have to get people right across America and Britain and Europe and the world as a whole concentrating on the economic issues that affect them, because when you don't have that, you have all these phony, racist and cultural wars, and sexist wars.

In America I think we need to move towards a social democracy, European-style basically, and I think that in Britain we do as well.