Hip-hop was the music that actually got me excited about it and the actual prospect of performing. I think I loved music from an early age because my parents wanted me to love it as much as they did. It was constantly there.

I've been writing a lot more folky, country type stuff. One of the reasons I wanted to write in the first place was because of Darrell Scott.

People have got no attention span these days with music - I come from the time where I bought the whole album and listened to it back to back.

I grew up in a little town called Uckfield, and there's not much to do - so we used to fight a lot. I was never in serious trouble, but we used to have the local bobby round the house saying, 'Rory's been up to this again.'

Parents shouldn't assume children are made out of sugar candy and will break and collapse instantly. Kids don't. We do.

What I want to do is tell stories about normal people in the American suburbs. I don't write the book where it's a conspiracy reaching the prime minister; I don't write the book with the big serial killer who lops off heads. My setting is a very placid pool of suburbia, family life. And within that I can make pretty big splashes.

My parents were not poor, I mean we were a very average middle-class family of academics, but my grandfather happened to have built house literally next to one of Kolkata's largest slum.

For all of higher civilization's recorded history, becoming a man was defined overwhelmingly as taking responsibility for a family.