It's painful and it's messy. But sometimes you just have to make the break and start again.

I am all for cracking down on inappropriate digital behaviour. Too often the connected world is an excuse for some coward hiding behind a keyboard to bully someone else.

You have to give kids from ordinary families a ladder. You have to show them there's a way out.

My teenage years were spent trying to look like Rod Stewart - I ended up looking like Dave Hill from Slade.

Largely this is a class thing - writers tend to be cosseted little middle-class kiddies who think that the world owes them a royalty cheque. But just doing it - being in your room for years on end, locked in your head, alone with invented ghosts - it weakens and softens the body. And I know I can't just live in my head.

My parents gave up a lot to bring me up in the little house on the prairie, and I wasn't prepared to make those sacrifices, nor was the generation before me and the generation after.

Grammar schools are public schools without the sodomy.