I have very fond memories of swimming in Walden Pond when we lived in Boston. You'd swim past a log and see all these turtles sunning themselves. Slightly disturbing if you thought about how many more were swimming around your toes, but also rather wonderful.

Siobhan also says that if you close your mouth and breathe out loudly through your nose it can mean that you are relaxed, or that you are bored, or that you are angry and it all depends on how much air comes out of your nose and how fast and what shape your mouth is when you do it and how you are sitting and what you just said before and hundreds of other things which are too complicated to work out in a few seconds.

Well, we're meant to be writing stories today.

My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.

Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.

There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.

Lots of things are mysteries. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them. It's just that scientists haven't found the answer yet.