When I first started writing in my early 20s it was literary criticism for a very eccentric magazine called Books And Bookmen, which allowed me to write, more or less anything.

If you're going to write about something it becomes a damn sight more interesting than if you're not going to write about it, because you engage with it actively in a way that you wouldn't if you were just passing through or if you were going to St Helens to visit family or if it was a place that made you resentful because you'd always wanted to escape from there.

One doesn't mind adverse criticism so long as it isn't stupid.

As primitive as digital can be, there is nothing automatic in the methods I use, it's all basically done by hand. I know nothing about computers. I don't like computers. I use them for writing because I have to. I have never had a conversation about computers in my life.

The only bright feature of cultural relativism's triumph is that it has become establishment orthodoxy and will thus one day be derided, resisted and overthrown.

I like irrational things. I like scenarios where I can think, 'It would be great if at this point we could do x.' And there doesn't have to be a reason for 'x'.

I think television is a medium which has the potential to do great things but has been traduced by these... terrible people who rise through the ranks.