I'm one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood.

You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it.

Writers never feel comfortable having labels attached to them, however accurate they are.

As the books grew bigger and more ambitious, the situations in question sometimes became political ones, and so it became necessary to start painting in the social background on a scale which eventually became panoramic.

It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political.

As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife's money and little bits I was picking up for journalism.

But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.