When I Was Younger, I

There's Still A Part Of Me That Thinks I Have To Write A Really Good Novel. I'm Not Trying To Say I'm Not Happy With The Novels I've Written In The Past. But It Always Feels To Me Like There's Another One That I Have To Write That Will Really Say What I Want To Say, And Really Paint This World That I Can See Hazily In My Head.

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.

It Is All Very Well, In These Changing Times, To Adapt One's Work To Take In Duties Not Traditionally Within One's Realm; But Bantering Is Of Another Dimension Altogether. For One Thing, How Would One Know For Sure That At Any Given Moment A Response Of The Bantering Sort Is Truly What Is Expected? One Need Hardly Dwell On The Catastrophic Possibility Of Uttering A Bantering Remark Only To Discover It Wholly Inappropriate.

There Was Surely Nothing To Indicate At The Time That Such Evidently Small Incidents Would Render Whole Dreams Forever Irredeemable.

I Grew Up In Britain Before It Became A Multicultural Place, So In Many Ways I Have A Nostalgia For An England That's Vanished - The England Of My Childhood Has Actually Disappeared.