A form of art that I like is portraiture. I've been thinking about portraiture, and its relationship to writing and literature, biography and autobiography, and so that will be my next thing.

[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.

One of the unfortunate things about creative writing courses is that they make people impatient. People feel that they have prepared themselves and that they must now do it. In fact there are positive incentives for doing so - universities are offering degrees for writing novels.

I think that a lot of people do have a physical Ithaca, but I don't think that I do and I think that a lot of people do not. This depends on your values and the circumstances of your life. My Ithaca is in the Mental realm and this doesn't mean that you don't have to go back to it.

I've always had a fascination for the stage which has to do with transfiguration. One moment you are John Smith from East Brighton riding in your cart, and the next moment you are in a completely different world.

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.

It is terribly important to maintain a national identity in a way that it probably wasn't before.