At 16, I dropped out of school and spent five years working as a bicycle mechanic and volunteering in a Trauma Centre before ultimately deciding to go to university.

Each time a high-wage job is lost, a family is turned upside down. And that affects the communities where they live.

If no one heard your sounds then you did not really make them.

No land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth.

My first published novel, American Rust, took three and a half years of full-time work to write. But I wrote two apprentice novels before that.

At 16, I dropped out of school and spent five years working as a bicycle mechanic and volunteering in a Trauma Centre before ultimately deciding to go to university.

Give a small number of people the power to enrich themselves beyond everyone's wildest dreams, a philosophical rationale to explain all the damage they're causing, and they will not stop until they've run the world economy off a cliff.