There is this notion that the lives of the comfortable-off middle class don't merit being treated seriously and with compassion.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

Madly, futilely, I wrote novel after novel, eight in all, that failed to find a publisher. I persisted because for me the novel was the supreme literary form - not just one among many, not a relic of the past, but the way we communicate to one another the subtlest truths about this business of living.

A well-off plastic surgeon can suffer just as much as an Irish lad who has been abused or whatever.

If these men decided that they have to go in there and fight, I want them to send their own children and grandchildren. I want them to not send a bunch of strangers' kids in there to fight and die.

If you can sit all generations of a family down and entertain them and, at the same time, leave them talking about existential notions, then that's fantastic.

I never liked my father. He really was a dullard and misanthrope. My mother and he were married for 22, years and it was an ill match. She encouraged me to be a writer. She opened her home to black friends, and this was the 1950s. She didn't care later when I write about her.

A family holiday to Jamaica in 2004 - my uncle was getting married out there, and it was the first holiday I'd had in Jamaica, which is where my father is from. My friends and I stayed in a really plush hotel, The Ritz-Carlton, so we had a great experience.