Until I was 16, I read nothing but science fiction. I loved William Gibson and I still do. But my favourite book when I was growing up, for a long time, was 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson, which I must have read about a dozen times when I was a teenager.

If I want to feel as if I'm being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.

I guess the main thing I definitely don't enjoy is having a job which involves selling things. You become an author because you think you're good at writing. Not because you love to promote yourself. I enjoy some of it and I've had a really fun few years so basically I have nothing to complain about. But what I don't like is the thought that it's going to go on for the rest of my life.

I'm very finicky about when I'm in the right mood to write. So most days, I find some excuse not to do anything.

I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.

I hate going back over what I've written. It makes me feel physically sick.

I always save a huge book for a flight, because then you read it at both airports and on the plane and by the time you get home you're a quarter of the way through and it doesn't feel so unmanageable any more.