It wasn't enough but it was a start. It might keep him going...
That was the trouble with moving houses; no matter how carefully you packed the books, they never ended up on the new shelves in quite the right place.
I was thinking things had changed: that the next generation of men weren't as institutionally misogynist as the previous were. And then, suddenly, the Internet came along and gave them a platform to voice their feelings anonymously. And boy, did the bile come out.
If you don't make the best-seller list, if you don't get shortlisted for any prizes, it's goodbye.
I have a vernacular house on the seaside in Northumberland and an Edwardian semi in south Manchester. They're both exactly as big as they need to be. I can't be doing with an ostentatious, big house - you can only be in one room at a time.
It seems to me that one of the things that happened with a lot of literary fiction in the 1980s and 1990s was that it became very concerned with the academy and less with how people live their lives. We got to a point where the crime novel stepped into the breach. It was also a time when the crime novel stopped being so metropolitan.
A lot of reality TV is repellent, but that doesn't diminish the qualities of some of the people who take part. There are decent people in there who have no alternatives.
I think Jane Austen builds suspense well in a couple of places, but she squanders it, and she gets to the endgame too quickly. So I will be working on those things.
Growing up in Fife, you were aware that there were these creatures called lesbians, but it was in the realms of complete freakishness. And I didn't feel like a freak.
The thing is that quite a few of my books have ended up as they are because of conversations I've had over the years with forensic scientists.
I spent a lot of time at my grandparents in the school holidays, and the only books in the house were a copy of the Bible and Agatha Christie's 'Murder at the Vicarage.' I developed a taste for murder mysteries and then later discovered libraries, second-hand bookshops, and jumble sales.
I did want to be Joni Mitchell for quite a long time.
I am the despair of my accountant; I am the plastic bags of receipts.
I won't be attempting to write Jane Austen-style prose - that would be suicidal. But I will attempt to bring the highest level of my own prose, and to make it sparkle.
Back in the day, when I started, you were still allowed to make mistakes. You got to make your mistakes in public, in a way. I think the world was a more forgiving place when I started my career, in the sense that we got time and space to develop as a writer.
