I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.

Where would we be without inhibitions? They're quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.

I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.

You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.

I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.

I find the attempt to find things out, which scientists are possessed by, to be as human as breathing, or feeding, or sex. And so the science has to be in the novels as science and not just as metaphors.