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.

I always thought it better to allow myself to doubt before I decided, than to expose myself to the misery, after I had decided, of doubting whether I had decided rightly and justly.

People of this teenager's age are on the brink of adulthood and have to be allowed a greater degree of responsibility. A consequence of this is a decrease in parental responsibility. Therefore to have criminal responsibility for what you don't know about seems rather extreme.

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

The true experimenters are there but no-one hears about them - the critical/review system tends to concentrate on the handful of 'major' writers and their promising successors; bookshops tend not to sell them; publishers don't promote them. It's the same fate as has befallen poetry.

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.

These days - with the decline of the traditional churches - I'm concerned about where we obtain some form of moral direction.