With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it's like to live in someone else's shoes.

Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.

The list of erratic actions from Mohammed bin Salman is long: the jailing of royal family members, the detention of the Lebanese prime minister, a nonsensical feud with Qatar, the growing internal repression of political speech, and the disastrous war in Yemen.

I was the first person from my family to enter films. So, everything connected with films was new to me, including fans and fan clubs.

We started off as Marcus Mumford, which is our singer's name. But then it very quickly became apparent it wasn't really a one-man thing: it was indeed a band. We wanted to give the impression of a family business, and we just liked the ring of Mumford & Sons.