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.

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.

I've never finished anything by Dickens.

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

I've got a big, long list of stuff you're entitled to hate about my books.

I don't have any sense of an audience when I'm writing. I don't consider the audience. Because all I'm interested in is the problem on the page.

I'm an atheist - a good old North Korean-style atheist.

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

I've never scared anybody in my life.

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.

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.

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 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.

I'm not thinking when I'm writing, 'How's this going to read?' Or, 'What percentage of the audience is going to stay with me?' The thing itself is what gives me pleasure. Sometimes stuff just falls onto the page so beautifully and happily that it's deeply satisfying. It's selfish!

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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'm a very secretive person.

There's a convention that books are mirrors of the real world, but our fact-obsessed age also wants fiction to be factually based and trustworthy.

Lots of people hate my stuff.

While we're having all these debates about how the book is being destroyed by the Kindle, we have to remember that narrative will not be affected at all because it's part of our makeup as a creature on this planet.

I'm not a new-agey person, but narrative is ancient and wise and generous.

The Commonwealth Prize is about celebrating the Commonwealth and the special relationship we have with the ex-colonies - which is part guilt and part warmth - and the Booker Prize isn't an essential part of that, but it is part of that.

I like shaped things. I like shape in things, and I do overshape things, it's true.

Inside, Penlee House is without pretension. It is a space that knows its limitations and its strengths - and makes the most of them.

I feel the political failings of the U.S.A. are presidential in length, but the aspirant narrative of the States is millennial in length.

I've been very lucky with prizes. But the thing about prizes is that, when you talk about a prize-winning author, you can be talking about one that is well-regarded but doesn't sell any books.