We never love anyone. Not really. We only love our idea of another person. It is some conception of our own that we love. We love ourselves, in fact.

My novels are often about people who are in love or attracted to each other.

When you experience bereavement at a youngish age, you suddenly realise that life is unjust and unfair, that bad things will happen, and you have to take that on board.

Is that a good definition of marking the ageing watershed? That moment when you realize - quite rationally, quite unemotionally - that the world in the not-so-distant future will not contain you: that the trees you planted will continue growing but you will not be there to see them.

I have to start my real life soon, before I die of boredom and frustration.

The only times we are consciously aware of the authorship of a photograph, I would argue, are when we contemplate the photographs we ourselves have taken (or those of friends and family) or when we go deliberately to the photographers monograph or exhibition. The signed image - the appropriated, the owned image - is by far the rarest in this pullulating world of pictures.

There is a disconnect between the film Bond and the literary Bond which is their contemporaneity. I don't suffer from that.