In old age, you realise that while you're divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it at will. As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage.

Grief-stricken. Stricken is right; it is as though you had been felled. Knocked to the ground; pitched out of life and into something else.

I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.

We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.

If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.