I grew up in Swaledale, in Iowa. Its population was 220 when I was growing up, and it's probably 150 now. I lived in town and sometimes worked on the farms outside of town in the summers.

The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs.

I tend to write about towns because that's what I remember best. You can put a boundary on the number of characters you insert into a small town. I tend to create a lot of characters, so this is a sort of restraint on the character building I do for a novel.

I don't think of my characters as bumbling. I think that trouble is what drives a novel, both big troubles and small troubles, and whatever people try to do in life, there are a series of stumbling-blocks in the way, and I think that makes for interesting reading. I think of them as doing their best with the roadblocks that they're given.

We was living in squats in Battersea when we started with Motorhead. And we lived with the Hell's Angels in this flat. They were always around.

All the legal action I've taken against newspapers has had a massively positive effect on my life and achieved exactly what I wanted, which is privacy and non-harassment.

Renzi is a pawn. Renzi is a dumb slave at the disposal of nameless people who want to control all of our lives from Brussels.

It was very interesting for me because DNA made music without much technical knowledge at all.