You may have gathered that I am not the most cheerful of revellers - some characterise me as the death and soullessness of any party but it wasn't always so, believe me.

My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.

I used to find myself goofed out in the street on drugs. And I had such a bad problem with addiction at the time that I didn't mind. I was dealing cocaine and shooting up a lot of cocaine. And that's not a good space to be in.

As a species, we're addicted to the facile discrimination involved in saying that something or phenomenon is either 'this' or 'that' - how much more uncomfortable that it may well be 'the other'.

Continuous present is all we have, and stream of consciousness - which in a novel is arguably just as artificial as the stilted dialogue that you get in most conventional novels. They're all stratagems to try to get closer to the texture of lived life.

I write as someone who has no more time for repressive Islam than he does for repressive Christianity or Judaism, but at least look at the face in the hijab - and try to imagine the one beneath the niqab - before you depersonalise its wearer.

So heedless have we become of our own image that second-hand mobile phones now invariably come with a SIM card chock-full of discarded intimacies.