I was a scholarship minor public school day boy at Ardingly College and later Whitgift School. Then, straight into work as a journalist - a wonderful thing for a writer.

Everything he had ever done that had been better left undone. Every lie he had told — told to himself, or told to others. Every little hurt, and all the great hurts. Each one was pulled out of him, detail by detail, inch by inch. The demon stripped away the cover of forgetfulness, stripped everything down to truth, and it hurt more than anything.

Rain in the graveyard, and the world puddled into blurred reflections.

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

I think that is something that I always like in my work - the sense of inclusion rather than the sense of otherness.

Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants.