I like the idea of a big caesura between the narratives, a space which readers can fill in with their own speculative history.

But you can try to read books at the wrong time or for the wrong reasons.

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.

I live a perfectly happy and comfortable life in Blair's Britain, but I can't work up much affection for the culture we've created for ourselves: it's too cynical, too knowing, too ironic, too empty of real value and meaning.

The plain fact is that she never really liked me, and never wanted me. I had been a mistake; and that, to some extent, is what I remain in my own eyes, to this day. The knowledge never goes, can never be undone. You just have to find a way to live with it.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.

Well, I like the rain before it falls.