I Just Wanted To Be An Ordinary,

London Has Always Provided The Landscape For My Imagination. It Becomes A Character - A Living Being - Within Each Of My Books.

I Strike Up Conversations All The Time And It Is Very Interesting, Finding Out About Things I Know Nothing About.

Sometimes The Silences, The Gaps, Tell Us More Than Anything Else.

Oh, I Just Tend To Believe In Things When I'm Writing Them. For Instance, When I Was Writing 'doctor Dee,' I Believed In Magic. And When I Wrote 'hawksmoor' I Believed In Psychic Geography. But As Soon As I Type The Last Full Stop, I'm Back To Being A Complete Blank Again.

And The Smell Of The Library Was Always The Same - The Musty Odour Of Old Clothes Mixed With The Keener Scent Of Unwashed Bodies, Creating What The Chief Librarian Had Once Described As 'the Steam Of The Social Soup.'