I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.

Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.

Children simply don't make the distinction; a book is either good or bad. And some of the books they think are good are very, very bad indeed.

Stories about mental aberration and oddity only make sense in context. Just how do people live with someone who is peculiar, gifted, strange or alien? It's odd because there's a little part of me that wants to write about exotic, strange bizarre subjects. Instead, I've rather reluctantly realised that what I write about is families.

Payments to the disabled are getting slashed and people like me are getting a tax cut. Who could possibly think that is a good thing?

And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don’t even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in you life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means they are so small you don’t have to take them into account when you are calculating something.

But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.