‘My natural habitat is a book-lined room, so a habit can be something in which we swathe ourselves, symbolic and protective, denoting belonging, in which we wish to dwell; that sounds just like my reading habit.’
Audio
‘You love Star Trek and Star Wars, because those things are like someone has gone into a laboratory and created the opposite of 1970s suburban London; don’t feel guilty about enjoying popular culture by the way, it’s going to have its moment.’
‘Selling books is as necessary as writing them but many writers, and I am one of them, have a love-hate relationship with the marketing of their books. This nearly always results from a mismatch.’