My default-setting Italian recipes that I always fall back on are the ones that we had as kids, like spaghetti vongole, which is tomato and clams with spaghetti.

I had a Saturday job in Barratts shoe shop at the age of 15.

Television is very instant. Theatre is much more free, but you are very much on your own up there on stage and in control of your own performance.

I went through a phase in my 20s when I was overdosing on self-help books, so it was really refreshing to read 'The Alchemist' because it was a novel, but it still had the same wisdom, wasn't patronising and didn't tell you how you should live your life.

Over the last 25 years, since a lot of science writing became accessible to layman, I've become quite a consumer of science. As a child, I wasn't streamed into science, and I regret that now.

I loved everything. I loved sciences and I loved humanities. But ultimately, I felt that in the humanities, you know, you're writing about things that already exist. But in the sciences, you're discovering things that no one has known before. Ultimately I chose psychology because it seemed to combine science with things that I liked to think about.

If you go all the way back, I've always written science-fiction, I've always written fantasy, I've always written horror stories and monster stories, right from the beginning of my career. I've always moved back and forth between the genres. I don't really recognise that there's a significant difference between them in some senses.

Religion was a part of our home life when I was growing up. I attended Catholic school. It was a good education - for the spiritual end, as well as for its discipline.