Some people don't realize that a straight 'No' can be the kindest answer in the world.

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.

The writer I feel the most affinity with - you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they're 18th century novels - is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he's the guy who does it for me.

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.

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

The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's.

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.