Life Wasn't About Becoming, Was It? It

Ethics Are Not Necessarily To Do With Being Law-abiding. I Am Very Interested In The Moral Path, Doing The Right Thing.

I Don't Have Goals When Writing Books, Apart From Getting To The End. I Have Rather Vague Ideas About How I Want Things To Feel, I'm Big On Ambience. I Have A Title, A Beginning And A Probable Ending And Go From There.

I Find The Past So Fascinating. Photographs Are Strange, Almost Surreal, Almost Here Yet Gone. I Slip Into Thinking What The Past Must Have Been Like And I Enjoy Creating That Ambience And Atmosphere - 1730 To Around 1870 Is The Most Interesting Period.

My Father Was An Autodidact. It Wasn't A Middle-class House. Shopkeepers Are Aspirant. He Paid For Me To Go To Private School. He Was Denied An Education - He Had A Horrible Childhood. He Got A Place At A Grammar School And Wasn't Allowed To Go.

Because I Write Fiction, I Don't Write Autobiography, And To Me They Are Very Different Things. The First-person Narrative Is A Very Intimate Thing, But You Are Not Addressing Other People As 'i' - You Are Inhabiting That 'i.'