I loved my time growing up in Northern Ireland doing youth drama, that is where it all began for me.

When I was growing up, Belfast City Hall was surrounded by security, and we had no access to it. But now, people come in and out of it all the time. On a nice day, office workers and students sit on the lawn outside and have lunch. It's great to see how Northern Ireland has changed. To be part of that is fantastic.

I get an awful lot of people coming up and saying they went to school with me. There must have been 80,000 pupils at that school!

In my life, I have made the occasional catastrophic choice, and it's just a case of moving on and learning from it.

In 1996, Bill Clinton declared the era of big government over in the State of the Union address.

Pretty much at all times music motivates me. How can I say this without sounding in any way proud of myself? Obviously I've always written songs that are critical of our government, and talk about our times. Hopefully you attempt to be timeless while doing it.

One's politics are part of one even when one is writing. But if I want to say anything about the state of civil society, I will write an essay. The responsibilities you feel as a novelist are literary ones, I think, not civic ones. And I think politicians are interesting to write about.

Instead of debating whether or not Russia attempted to influence the 2016 elections - in ways that ranged from encouraging incorrect voting methods to promoting fake rallies to sharing false election stories - Americans should be debating how to counter this activity.