I'm mainly an airport author, and if you're trying to take your mind off the journey, you're not going to read 'King Lear.'

Because I saw my parents relaxing in armchairs and reading and liking it, I thought it was a peaceful grown-up thing to do, and I still think that.

I've been very lucky and I have a happy old age with good family and friends still around.

Of course I wanted children. Bright, gorgeous, loving children. I could almost see them.

I never wanted to write. I just wrote letters home from a kibbutz in Israel to reassure my parents that I was still alive and well fed and having a great time. They thought these letters were brilliant and sent them to a newspaper. So I became a writer by accident.

Happiness is knowing and appreciating what you've got. I am very, very, very grateful for what, to me, is dead easy.

I'm getting better, happier, and nicer as I grow older, so I would be terrific in a couple of hundred years time.