...and there was nothing to do except to wait and to hurt.

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.

At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.

I suffer depression only in the sense that I am a writer. We don't have proper jobs to go to. We are on our own all day. Show me a writer who doesn't get depressed: who has a completely stable mood. They'd be a garage mechanic or something.

... why I like timetables, because they make sure I don't get lost in time.

I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.

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.