His eyes are wild, psychotic slits that bat-dance in your soul looking for good things to crush or bad elements to identify with.

If I don't have something to do, I'm not the kind of person who can sit on a beach on holiday. I've got to go and check things out and see things and look at things, and have some kind of itinerary in my mind. I think that a lot of people who are, in some ways, successful are kind of like that.

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

I can see why the Russians love Robert Burns, I think that Russians and Koreans have a very similar outlook to Scots.

Most middle-class people I know don't really live like me. Middle-class people worry a lot about money. They worry a lot about job security, and they do a lot of nine-to-five stuff.

As a writer, you play this daft game with yourself - you're constantly looking for distractions, anything to stop you from writing, but you're constantly fighting the distractions to write as well.

I think there is a natural thing that you feel when you've written something taboo because you just don't want to expose the people you're close to.