The word "metaphor" means carrying something from one place to another . . . and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't. This means that the word "metaphor" is a metaphor. I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining and apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.

Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.

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

I think good books have to make a few people angry.

If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.

...and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything

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.