"I live quietly at home among my family and friends."

"No, I'm happy to go on living the life I've chosen. I'm a university teacher and I like my job."

"My job is to look at what politics is doing, not be a politician myself."

"Literature for me isn't a workaday job, but something which involves desires, dreams and fantasy."

"I went to an all-boys school and hated feeling like one of the crowd."

"One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible."

"I started acting pretty young, so I haven't had too many odd jobs. But I used to sell candy out of my locker in middle school."

"That is a secondary teacher conception - the writer as an observer."