As a child, growing up in Hampstead, North London, I was shockingly fair-skinned. Holidays involved me spending the second and third day face-down on a bed, shrieking should anyone touch my blistered skin.

Just as there are moments when the words flow and it feels like the easiest job in the world, there are many more when I think I have nothing to say, and my journalism training taught me that writing is a job, that you write whether you are inspired or not, and that the only way to unlock creativity is to write through it.

I had just got married when I started writing my fourth novel. I'd come back from honeymoon, moved into our first house - a gorgeous little carriage house in London - and made my office on the third floor, overlooking the treetops in North West London.

I believe it is the flaws that make us interesting, our backgrounds, the hardships.

Legislation has been and is still directed towards the protection of wealth, rather than towards the far more important interests of labor on which everything of value to mankind depends.

The truth be told, the World Trade Center was neither a very good work of architecture nor a very successful piece of urbanism. Its shortcomings were somewhat mitigated by the westward and southward expansion of the World Financial Center and Battery Park City during the 1980s.

I like to play golf. You know, make a little money, lose a little money. Get 10 bucks, lose 20 bucks.

My family didn't have lots of money or anything.