Listening to people discussing a novel can be very interesting, if you've read whatever novel is being discussed. No one, it seems, ever says, "This is a great book but I didn't like it." Taking a little time to think about why this might be has been very liberating.

Writing is indeed essential to me. I have been writing for a long time but not for publication. I'm sure there are many, many people who do the same. The rewards of writing are in the process and not the product - not just for me but for others I have met.

Experience belongs to the actor, but the story belongs to the teller. We write so we will never forget.

I had a tough childhood, yes. I was born in rural Bangladesh to parents who had had no education beyond high school. We moved to the UK where I grew up in poverty, in some of the worst conditions in a developed economy, before moving to the projects - heaven - and I went to unremarkable schools before going to university. My father was a bus conductor first and then a waiter, and my mother a seamstress.

Another effect of news articles is that the events, however frightening, can thus be consigned to the box of things that happen to other people, not us, and that we are doing things to bring them under control. This is the diet we're fed all the time, so we acculturate to it. And news must, in turn, follow the form to which we - our bodies - are accustomed: describe the event, incite the fear, then say how it's being addressed, how the herd's alpha males are dealing with it.

The technology broadens an individual's social field massively and at the same time makes it much, much easier and cheaper to consume gossip. We have the same appetite for gossip, but now its acquisition is even easier than grabbing sugary and fatty foods off a supermarket shelf. And look where that got us. When you watch people in public desperately punching away at their machines, it's hard not to think of addictions.

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.