Just lock myself in a room, stop answering emails, stop answering the phone and I come out with something.

He emphasised basic truths: you are not dying yet, you have to live your life until you are. Underpinning them was the belief that the grim reality of impending death can be talked away by trying to invest in the present reality of life. I didn’t believe that at the time, but now I do. By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be.

When people start writing there is this idea that you have to get everything right first time, every sentence has to be perfect, every paragraph has to be perfect, every chapter has to be perfect, but what youre doing is not any kind of public show, until youre ready for it.

When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.

I'm not really interested in courting controversy, but I am interested in exploring issues that other people would deem to be controversial.

Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.

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