I often play little games in my head.
Unless you have a real sense of precious things under threat, there would be nothing sad about time being limited.
Until then, I was knocking on doors. Afterward, my wife and I started to get a different kind of dinner invitation altogether.
I went through my purple-prose phase in my songwriting... I was really writing between the lines. And that was what I took into my fiction. That was my apprenticeship, really.
I still have a suspicion of charity and think the state has a role to play in many areas. And although for most of the years since I have been a rather privileged writer, I identify more closely than perhaps I should with those social workers. Had I not become a writer that would have been me.
By mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way-one solid scene doesn't have to fall on another solid scene, you can just have a fragment that then dovetails into another one that took place 30 years apart from it. It doesn't have to be fully realized, it can be a glancing, shadowy reference to something that you'll come back to later, and then it moves on.
When you are young, things like your moral stance and your political position seem very important. I'd spend long nights with my friends sorting out moral and political positions that we thought would take us through adult life. And part of that would end up meaning we despised some people not for what they did, but for the opinions they professed to hold.
The idea of a successful novel was something that was reviewed in the Observer and then sank without trace. Literature wasn't a happening thing in those days. Music and fringe theatre and television playwriting were far more exciting.
I work very regular hours, roughly 9 to 530. I think I have it much easier than a lot of parents. I just sit at home.
I think the judging process is full of integrity, compared to some other prizes around the world. The fact that they change the panel of judges every year keeps it from becoming corrupt. I think it's very difficult if you've got judges for life obviously relationships are cultivated between judges and authors, and publishing houses.
While it is important to have principles, you have far less control of what happens. These principles and positions only get you so far, because what actually happens is that you don't carefully chart your way through life. You are picked up by a wind every now and again and dumped down somewhere else.
I went many years without even associating Nagasaki with the atomic bomb. Then in the 1980s, when there was a new concern about CND and so on, Nagasaki took on this symbolic value. I felt my Nagasaki had been appropriated. It was suddenly this burning city of ashes. For me, it was where I lived until the age of 5.
It is a protected world. To some extent at least you have to shield children from what you know and drip-feed information to them. Sometimes that is kindly meant, and sometimes not.
I want my words to survive translation. I know when I write a book now I will have to go and spend three days being intensely interrogated by journalists in Denmark or wherever. That fact, I believe, informs the way I write-with those Danish journalists leaning over my shoulder.
I felt I had almost written myself into a corner. You could say I'd rewritten the same novel three times and I thought I had to move on. The success of the book, and then the movie, had by then also created a commercial expectation and I remember touring America and seeing people in the audiences who I thought might not want to read the books I wanted to write next. My constituency had become broader, but more mysterious to me.
Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.
My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation.
If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them.
I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.
I do feel part of that generation of people who were rather idealistic in the '70s and became disillusioned in the '80s. Not just about social services issues, but the world.
I'm very fortunate in that I don't have money problems. I have lunch with my wife at home. I don't have to commute, so I have much more time with my family.
I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time.
Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time, it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.
I had been plunged into a different world. I found myself spending half my time answering weird questions on book tours in the Midwest. People would stand up and explain to me the situation in their office and ask me whether they should resign or not.
What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.
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