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I'm not going to write any more novels. I don't want to end up being one of these angry, bitter writers moaning that only three people are reading him. I don't want that.

When people asked me what I did, I'd say, 'I work in publishing', and when they then say, 'What side of it?', I say, 'Supply' - no doubt leaving them to think I drive the books around in a van and deliver them.

There is no comparison. The American landscape is so much more dangerous. They have real snakes, mountain lions, bears; we only have adders, and they're more frightened of us than we are of them.

I didn't go to university straight after school. I went at night.

I'm not that well-versed in literary theory - I don't know what it is.

I come from a working-class background where I was much more likely to read socialist books and leaflets than Bronte or Dickens - neither of whom I've yet read.

I was brought up in a flat in North London - virtually the last building in London, because north of us was countryside all the way to the coast, and south of us was non-stop London for 20 miles.

Even though my brother and I loved scrumping - we loved the act of climbing trees and grabbing fruit - there was always fear we would be caught. We feared we'd be imprisoned, sent to Australia.

I've never finished anything by Dickens.

For 'The Gift of Stones,' I spent an afternoon chasing a flock of Canadian geese.

I should have been kinder when I was younger.

I am not - thank heavens - one of those 'driven' writers who spend a fortnight buckled with empty fright over an untouched page only to wake at two in the morning feverish with paragraphs.

I'm a matter-of-fact, office-hours writer.

Sixteen years as a freelance features journalist taught me that neither the absence of 'the Muse' nor the presence of 'the block' should be allowed to hinder the orderly progress of a book.

Good old-fashioned, puritanical work guilt is, for me, a better colleague than any Muse. If I reach my weekly word target by Friday afternoon, then the weekend is guilt-free.

All the uncontrollable and unpredictable parts of my life - from the actual creation to my emotional responses to the finished book - I've succeeded in banishing to the office. And I think I'm happier for it.

Part of me feels that I'm letting people down by not being as interesting as my books.

I'd dearly love to write a political book that changed the hearts and minds of men and women.

We're all blemished. Yet we do love and are loved.

I don't have a constituency, and I'm not autobiographical in any way. I write these deeply moral books in a country which would prefer irony to anything with a moral tone.

I've never scared anybody in my life.

I'm a very secretive person.

I have tested my nerve by reaching a little too closely toward a lengthy alligator on the Gulf Coast and a saucer-sized tarantula in a Houston car park.

The most I have to fear while hiking in Warwickshire and Worcestershire, the two historic British counties closest to my city home in Birmingham, is whether or not the mud awaiting me in the narrow lanes ahead is deep enough to foul my socks.

I have, I must admit, despised the English countryside for much of my life - despised it and avoided it for its want of danger and adventure.

You stand beneath the arthritic boughs of any English oak, and you survey a thousand tales.

If you read the fables, 'Beowulf,' for example, you will know something about the person who writes them, and I like that. Secondly, they will not be about individuals; they will be about community. Thirdly, they're all about moralizing. Fourthly, the way they express themselves takes its tone from the oral tradition.

I want to live in a city where the future is being mapped out.

I know my 17-year-old self would read my bourgeois fiction, full of metaphors and rhythmic prose, with a sinking heart.

I felt that, in some ways, my novels lacked heart because of the distance between me and the subject matter. But no one wants to read a book based on good health, a happy upbringing, a long marriage.

When you start a novel, it is always like pushing a boulder uphill. Then, after a while, to mangle the metaphor, the boulder fills with helium and becomes a balloon that carries you the rest of the way to the top. You just have to hold your nerve and trust to narrative.

As a Midlander and a big walker, I'd always loved ridge and furrow fields, the plough-marked land as it was when it was enclosed. It is the landscape giving you a story of lives that ended with the arrival of sheep.

Try pitching a story of happiness to your editors, and their toes are going to curl up.

I'm very aware when I share a stage with other writers that I'm much less driven than they are. I don't wake up in the middle of the night, pregnant with paragraphs. I don't suffer for my text twenty-four hours a day.

Storytelling enables us to play out decisions before we make them, to plan routes before we take them, to work out the campaign before we start the war, to rehearse the phrases we're going to use to please or placate our wives and husbands.

My tongue is what I used instead of my fists because I was a small and cowardly young man. Amusing people with stories and being bizarre with words was my way of getting out of fixes.

I adore falseness. I don't want you to tell me accurately what happened yesterday. I want you to lie about it, to exaggerate, to entertain me.

I stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist.

When a book goes well, it abandons me. I am the most abandoned writer in the world.

I'm interested in taking hold of the dull truth narrative and finding inside it the transcendence and spirituality and hysteria normally associated with religion.

Narrative is so rich; it's given up so much.

I never think of the reader. I am curious about things; I need to find out, so off I go.

The problems of the world are not going to be engaged with and solved in Faversham, they're going to be sorted out in cities like Birmingham.

Retiring from writing is to avoid the inevitable bitterness which a writing career is bound to deliver as its end product in almost every case.

Retiring from writing is not to retire from life.

You can't sing baritone when you're a soprano.

I have in the past acquired a reputation for concocting non-existent writers and unwritten volumes.

I'm not good at dialogue. I'm not good at holding a mirror up at a real world. I'm not good at believable characterisation.

When I was a youngster, I was brought up in a very political background on an estate in north London.

English politics is so much more concerned with the proprieties than with defending dogmas.

Writing careers are short. For every 100 writers, 99 never get published. Of those who do, only one in every hundred gets a career out of it, so I count myself as immensely privileged.

I liked journalism and thought it was important, certainly more important than fiction. I'd probably still be doing it if I hadn't been elbowed out.

After 25 years sitting on my own in a room, I was looking for a more companionable job and wanted to work more collaboratively. I've also been very lucky in my career, with good advances and multibook deals. But there is some extent to which I worried that I was writing for the contract and not for the impulse of the thing itself.

My dad didn't have a formal education, but he had a wonderful vocabulary. So in 'Harvest,' I wanted my main character to be an innately intelligent man who would have the vocabulary to say whatever he wanted in the same way as lots of working-class people can.

Everyone says I should write a natural history or landscape book because if I have an area of amateur expertise, it is in those things.

The western view of Christ is usually of a stainless being with fair hair who appears to have come from Oslo.

Writers who want to interfere with adaptations of their work are basically undemocratic. The book still stands as an entity on its own.

Almost everyone who's been to primary school in Britain has had towels put on their heads to play the shepherds in the nativity play.

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