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.

Well, I like the rain before it falls.

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.

I was going to say 'my friend Stuart', but I suppose he's not a friend any more. I seem to have lost a number of friends in the last few years. I don't mean that I've fallen out with them, in any dramatic way. We've just decided not to stay in touch. And that's what it's been: a decision, a conscious decision, because it's not difficult to stay in touch with people nowadays, there are so many different ways of doing it. But as you get older, I think that some friendships start to feel increasingly redundant. You just find yourself asking, "What's the point?" And then you stop.

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

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