The reason I start a novel is because there's something that excites me and I want to explore it.

I would love to learn how to air kiss non-awkwardly.

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

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.

When I'm writing new material, I never have any trouble coming up with ideas.

Politicians often like to suggest that their policies come about through objective thinking, but if you look at British fascists, for example, what you see - what I see - is a group of people coming to the decisions they came to because something happened to them when they were nine-years-old, or because of some deep prejudice that formed in them subsequent to that.

Statistically, you don't have much chance of becoming president if you're not tall and fairly handsome or at least conventional-looking.