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.

When I re-read the Odyssey, it felt like I was reading PD James or Minette Walters - you feel that you are sharing in something that hundreds of millions of people have read with love, and I think that this is worth holding onto. It is not a matter of canonical texts or elitism, which the universities are trying to make us wary about. It is about shared language and metaphor and experience and imagery and that is all good.

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.

One has to choose a word in English. If you want to be eligible for a literary prize you have to designate it as something.

You are obviously writing out of experience and so the boundaries are always blurred, it is just that sometimes it would seem that you are playing with fire a little bit by choosing someone that obviously existed.

Wonder - the sensation of being whisked out of time and space...to be bathed in ... epiphanous delight.

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