I had loved poetry and the theatre. Now I loved adventure more.

Research material can turn up anywhere - in a dusty old letter in an archive, a journal or some old photographs you find in a charity shop.

Grabbing readers by the imagination is a writer's job.

It is one of the benchmarks of a culture I always think – the page at which it operates. A good way to measure it is to order a taxi and see how irate local people get if it is late.

Writers are a product of where we come from but by looking at alternatives to the culture in which we live, we can find ways to change and hopefully improve it.

Very often the characters people respond to best have little parts of reality they can relate to.

A book is a story, even if it's non-fiction, and once I've read it, I have the story with me inside my head always.