You stand beneath the arthritic boughs of any English oak, and you survey a thousand tales.

There is no reason why the Louvre should be your favourite gallery just because it has the grandest collections in France, any more than Kew should necessarily be a favourite garden because it has the largest assemblage of plants, or Tesco your chosen shop because it has the widest variety of canned beans.

Sixteen years as a freelance features journalist taught me that neither the absence of 'the Muse' nor the presence of 'the block' should be allowed to hinder the orderly progress of a book.

I don't have a constituency, and I'm not autobiographical in any way. I write these deeply moral books in a country which would prefer irony to anything with a moral tone.

Retiring from writing is to avoid the inevitable bitterness which a writing career is bound to deliver as its end product in almost every case.

For all the splendours of the world's greatest galleries, visitors are likely to be kept at arm's length, spectators of a world that can seem too rarefied to let them in.

Storytelling enables us to play out decisions before we make them, to plan routes before we take them, to work out the campaign before we start the war, to rehearse the phrases we're going to use to please or placate our wives and husbands.

My dad didn't have a formal education, but he had a wonderful vocabulary. So in 'Harvest,' I wanted my main character to be an innately intelligent man who would have the vocabulary to say whatever he wanted in the same way as lots of working-class people can.

I stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist.