Living in France means I see the UK in snapshots. There is something quite nice about being in exile and the things you remember about places tend to be the most vivid details. You don't get that when you see somewhere every day.

I do always know where I'm going in my books. I know the endpoint. I've written only two thousand words of my next novel but I know what the ending will be already.

I wanted to write a book that imagined where advances in the study of genetics might lead us. Holman was the first character who came to me: I envisaged the misshapen offspring of beautiful, wealthy parents. Then I realised that he bore a striking resemblance to Toulouse-Lautrec. I developed that, made Holman an alcoholic who lives among hookers, an artist tortured by his disability.

Living in France means I see the UK in snapshots. There is something quite nice about being in exile and the things you remember about places tend to be the most vivid details. You don't get that when you see somewhere every day.

What I imagined doesn't require anti-gravity beams or anything too spectacular, just advances in analysing different genes, finding out what they can do and recombining them.

We have this sense that there's something bigger than us, above and beyond. If you take away the idea of God, you need to replace it with a shared moral code. Otherwise, everybody becomes very self-centred and materialistic.

New technologies are a good thing but we must consider how they will impact on us so that, when they become achievable, they aren't allowed to run amok.