Glen Duncan

I, made in England, felt excluded, miffed, resistant to the idea of even visiting India, a position of increasing absurdity as, one by one, backpacking friends returned from the place with the standard anecdotal combo of nirvanic epiphany and toilet horror.

The winter of 1991 found me stunned and shivering in the aftermath of an imploded love affair. Being 26, I flung myself actorishly on London and, without any intimations of my own ludicrousness, spent two years showing God what I thought of Him by letting myself go.

I'm constantly dogged with a feeling of fraudulence, so if somebody tells me they like what I've written, then I immediately begin to think it's rubbish.

I'm too conceited for therapy.

I used to believe in signs, omens, patterns, secret purpose, synchronicities.

I don't think things happen for a reason, but I think it's perfectly possible to experience life meaningfully.

Life would be much easier if I just wrote the same book over and over again. But I'm not interested in doing that.

Fairy tales read before bed tend to make me dream. They're all quite violent stories, as are my dreams.

If being a werewolf is really a curse, you've got to treat it honorably. If werewolves are going to carry on, there has to be an incredibly powerful force. There is the business of the craving, the hunger for the kill. It has to be deeply pleasurable and more than an appetite for meat. There has to be a sensual dimension to it.

In a fit of pique, I said to my agent, 'I'm going to write something you can sell.' The idea was to write a straight page-turner, with no literary conceits.

I will waste an extraordinary amount of time, you know. And if it's not watching television, I'll be sitting staring out of the window. And yes, I know there's the idea of the artist, sitting there doing nothing while things are going on, but actually, no. It's vacant space. I'm thinking about the laundry.

My family is Anglo-Indian, and of the four children, I'm the only one who wasn't born in India.