Any setting can potentially acquire this vividness. It slowly arrives during the period of research, until it is as immediate to me as my own real surroundings.

When you've finished a piece of work you've had a kind of love affair with it.

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

In America you can be Donald Trump, have a business go wrong, and file for Chapter 11. You can move on, and no one complains. When his casinos were in Chapter 11, he was still on TV telling people how to get rich. I had to persevere for years with easyInternet because I couldn't afford to hurt the brand.

I am at A and going all the way to Z is high unlikely in any career, let alone football. You have to weave your way like the river, pick up your skills and keep going.

I think that the romantic impulse is in all of us and that sometimes we live it for a short time, but it's not part of a sensible way of living. It's a heroic path and it generally ends dangerously. I treasure it in the sense that I believe it's a path of great courage. It can also be the path of the foolhardy and the compulsive.

If Leander Paes can be playing in Grand Slams at 44 and Narain Karthikeyan race at 40 and be so successful at it, I see no reason why I can't play at 34. They are my motivation, as they have set targets and standards for people like us to achieve.