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.

Talk about burning books and burning bushes, I think that reading an effective novel can be like being immersed in fire and emerging as something a little different.

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.

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.

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

Words become, 'product', so that it is as though you'd bought a 'hand-cooked' packet of crisps; there are different makes, various flavours, but in the end, they're all rather similar and while eating them while sipping white wine makes you feel posher than if you'd bought the bog-standard ones, afterwards you don't remember very much about them.