An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

If you were a boy and a girl and you were in love with each other, really, properly in love, and if you could show it, then the people who run Hailsham, they sorted it out for you. They sorted it out so you could have a few years together before you began your donations.

There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.

Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.

I've always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

Now naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways.

What interests me is the surprising enormous extent to which most people accept the fate that's been given to them, and find some dignity.