I write because I feel driven to write. I write from a sense of inner necessity. I don't write for anything other than that.

Is there anything more useless than a crouton? I sometimes wake up in the small hours with a start and realise that what's roused me is an overpowering urge to visit violence on its originator.

You can always spot a 'television personality', even when they aren't actually on television, because they carry their 'made-up' persona in front of them, like some sort of baffler, or Ready Brek force field. Their reach for notoriety predicated on that fulsome mediocrity of talent detailed above has become frozen in their faces.

So I was smacked up on the Prime Minister's jet – big deal.

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

I think the fundamental apprehension is that the city's an organism of some form, rather than being governed from above.

If you believe something, you can have a morality that means something as well. You can feel recognized as an individual within the universe; it can give meaning to who you are.