By delivering experience, novels can alter the stance we adopt toward news - not much, I'm sure, but they can make it a little more difficult for us to consign "other people" to our tidy boxes. Widening our imaginative life might - it's not hard to imagine - also develop our ability to contemplate counterfactuals and our capacity to speculate about how things might differ from how they're being represented.

The twentieth century saw a professionalization of fiction writing, particularly in its second half and particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world - not so much mainland Europe, for example.

My own disposition is to trust the reader. Of course, there's a line between trusting the reader and expecting her to read your mind. That's where a friend or an editor comes in. A great editor will tell you straight when you've drifted into the latter territory.

There are a variety of ways in which a wedge is driven between the reality of the world outside, the motion of atoms, and our conception of what is there. Some of it has to do with what we're told, some of it to do with sensibilities that might be described as cultural, some of it to do with habit, some to do with heuristics we, as Homo sapiens, invoke because we cannot do otherwise - to name just a few of the impediments.

One problem I have with talking about myself in the context of class divisiveness is that I can be - and indeed have been - used by others to demonstrate its absence and that it's only a matter of hard work to move upward socially. After all, how could I complain about anything, if the retort is: "But look where you got to? It can't be all that bad." But this is nonsense as an argument quite aside from its empirical absurdity because no single case can invalidate a statistical claim.

My parents were entirely unpredictable and what they said very unreliable, which meant I became very attuned to the range of other signals human beings give out - body language or what Freud graphically called the "betrayal that oozes out of him at every pore," betrayal, that is, of what they really mean. I have that to this day, and it makes conversation exhausting because I'm listening not just to the words of the person in front of me but also to their body. It's as if there are two radio stations on at the same time.

Until I reached my late teens, there was not enough money for luxuries - a holiday, a car, or a computer. I learned how to program a computer, in fact, by reading a book. I used to write down programs in a notebook and a few years later when we were able to buy a computer, I typed in my programs to see if they worked. They did. I was lucky.