I no longer attempt to rationalise inexplicable phenomena; there are explanations, Horatio, but they are likely to be beyond our ken.

In effective literature, ideas emerge from matter, not the other way around. So I squeeze the dirt for all it's worth and watch the sparks and diamonds fly. Add to this, the lubrication which music can provide, and you've got a workable literary form. Even when we reach the stars, we'll still be gazing down into the gutter.

I don't buy the 'cynical voice'; I think we've had too much of that over the past few years; it's become deadening. I'm a passionate person, who is not afraid to express emotion in print.

I know people who've passed every creative writing course under the sun and who are more analytically intelligent and far better-read than I, but who just can't write either fiction or drama. It's like any art-form. In order for talent to be developed, crafted, it's got to be there in the first place.

My motto is: write about anything you bloody well like; just make sure you do it effectively. We've all had all the emotions, the rest is research and that leap which some can do and others cannot - it's not really something you can learn, otherwise all academics of literature would be wonderful fiction writers.

Inspiration comes from books, music, films and of course, living memories and life experiences, my own and those of people I've known or met; the casual glimpse from the stranger or the life and death of the close relative; to breathe, for a moment, a Chekhovian air, it's all song and ice.

When I was a child, I used to go wandering - disused railway-lines, old barns, dry-stone walls, strangely Pre-Raphaelite copses - it's much more fun to wander than to be guided, and you could do it in those days with freedom and without paranoia. In similar fashion, I try to allow the reader room to wander, even to meander, to almost lose themselves and their grip of the narrative.