I want to write the sort the book that my people want to read, even if the market is small.

In the theatre, you are in love with what is on the stage, with the moment. You just don't get that with movies or videos, or TV, where you know that what you are seeing is repeatable.

Despite the war, and bombings, and all the big things that happen to us, the stuff of our lives is small and always will be. During a war it is different, but even then, it is perfectly possible to write novels during a major war, which are about those thing which endure. It is what makes us human and the thing which is going to keep going.

Those are the two things: a sense of loving and being loved, and being creative - that is what life is made up of, and what literature reminds us of.

The Odyssey and Iliad say things about the human condition in ways we should re-acquaint ourselves with, and use as a prism to interpret though.

[Anton] Chekhov is the most produced playwright in the world after Shakespeare, and most of the people in my sort of audience would have seen at least one of his plays.

Writers feel that they can't afford to wait. They must do it now, and they are so clever, and there is so much competition. I'm quite happy to wait, and quite confident that the muses will cross the stream.