I'm quite influenced in this by one of my heroes, Montaigne, who thought a man's real task was to render as honest an account of himself as he could.

The absurdist stuff wasn't terribly popular at the time I was doing it.

It takes me a long time to get with a landscape. It took me 20 years before I wrote anything about Ibiza, and I haven't written about Oregon yet, although I've been there 20 years - possibly I'm almost due.

So I wrote what I hoped would be science fiction, I was not at all sure if what I wrote would be acceptable even. But I don't say that I consciously wrote with humour. Humour is a part of you that comes out.

I think it can be quite impossible to think well of yourself, so I prefer not to think about that too much. But I am very pleased, obviously.

I'm not too fond of the hard work and the constant battle with self-doubt that goes on when I write, but I figure that's part of the territory.

I'm not so interested any more in how a great deal of science fiction goes. It goes into things like Star Wars and Star Trek which all go excellent in their own way.