Writing a novel is like an amusement park or a museum or a city. You go into that place and you have certain experiences and those experiences, hopefully, have some impact on you.

Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.

I like the idea of an open, international London that thrives on attracting hard-working, talented people but has the confidence to tell them they must play by the same rules as everyone else.

Religion is not something I like to talk about publicly. One reason is the politics, but also I think spirituality is deeply personal.

When people talk about the death of the novel, they are speaking of the need for the birth of something different.

The anger is useful too because when things about the world upset you, that is really a fertile feeling to channel into fiction and to put out into books.

I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.