I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

Who Saddam Hussein kills, dies.

When I was three, I wanted to be four. When I was four, I wanted to be prime minister.

While there may not be a book in every one of us, there is so often a damned good short story.

I learnt a lot about myself, I learnt a lot about other people and the problems they have. If I was lucky enough to live to a hundred, how I will feel about two per cent of my life being that way, I don't know.

But the thing I felt most strongly about, and put at the end of one of the prison diaries, was education.

Well I think after leaving prison, and having written three diaries about life in prison, it became a sort of a new challenge to write another novel, to write a new novel.