Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
I really do literally put myself into a character's shoes.
'The Chimney Sweeper's Boy' began differently from any previous book I'd written. It actually derives from a story a friend - the novel's dedicatee, Patrick Maher - told me.
Haemophilia itself is bad enough. It is disabling day by day, even if far less incapacitating than in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But the added burden of life-threatening further illnesses from contaminated NHS blood is far worse.
The treatment of patients with contaminated blood has been described as one of the most tragic episodes in the history of the NHS.
I get very tired of violence in crime fiction. Maybe it is what life is like, but I don't want to do it in my books.
I don't feel that I wanted to spend my whole writing life - which is my life - writing detective stories.
The old detective story that's got a really complicated motive doesn't apply to mine.
In judging other people's work, particularly short stories, I have noticed how novice writers tell the readers everything about their characters in the first paragraphs, disclose their motives, reveal their recent activities and their future intentions.
I get up just before six and come downstairs, put food out for the cats, and open the cat flap. Then I work out for 35 or 40 minutes - I have a very large bathroom with an elliptical cross-trainer and a bicycle.
People are still being put into geriatric wards when they don't need it. They need treatment, not just being put into bed and fed.
My favourite book - 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford, which I have read about 20 times - is different from my favourite author, who is Iris Murdoch. I find her books exciting and unputdownable. Her characters are so carefully studied and in-depth; I love that.
Ford Maddox Ford's 'The Good Soldier' is my favourite novel. I first read it in the 1950s and have read it about 20 times since. It's possibly the best-constructed book in the English language.
I agree with what Mark Twain said - we're all mad at night.
I'm a very rigorous person. I like to take exercise. People get mired in old age, they get bent and twisted, but I can stop that.
My mother had multiple sclerosis.
My mother started to suffer from multiple sclerosis, but nobody knew what MS was then. My father didn't - and later he suffered a great deal of guilt over that. It was an awful business and very fraught.
Old women especially are invisible. I have been to parties where no one knows who I am, so I am ignored until I introduce myself to someone picked at random. Immediately, word gets round, and I am surrounded by people who tell me they are my biggest fans.
I have an idea, and I have a perpetrator, and I write the book along those lines, and when I get to the last chapter, I change the perpetrator so that if I can deceive myself, I can deceive the reader.
The more you pander to what is, presumably, the taste of young people, the more you corrupt.
