It's always better if you're next door. Ideas come up at the oddest times. They don't always come up in a conference call.

It seems we are capable of immense love and loyalty, and as capable of deceit and atrocity. It's probably this shocking ambivalence that makes us unique.

I have a backlog of novels which I would love to be working on and would be working on if I were not obliged to hold down a full time job.

It's basically a home-rule issue. I think the governing authority that appoints people as assessors certainly has reasons for doing it. ... And it certainly ought to be the board of assessors' right to say who is best qualified to serve as an appraiser.

I don't see myself as experimenting in any conscious way, it's perhaps that certain books require different densities of language.

The older I get, the more I seek to use a plain prose style, concentrating more on story.

My work is known by too few people for me to be remembered as a writer - that is, beyond those dedicated souls (bless them) who have followed the oeuvre through its various stages. To be realistic, when they and the last of my friends have died, I doubt I shall be remembered at all.