Writing a book is as difficult or as easy as any other job. Everyone's job is difficult. So to fetishize difficulties in writing as something extra-difficult or something very privileged - I don't buy that at all.

To write, I think one must sit in one place and be bored. Boredom is a very good state for writers to be. Things cook away in your head when you're bored, and suddenly one day, you have a book or a germ of a book.

Fiction can either be a mirror reflecting you back to yourself or it can be a clean pane of glass looking on the outside.

The bestseller charts, a sure indicator of public taste, tell us with relentless frequency that Marian Keyes or Jeffrey Archer is a better author, by some dizzying six-figure sum, both in numbers of copies and money, than, say, J. M. Coetzee or Patrick White. Are they right?

Music, photography, media, film - it's all going to be free on the Internet. We have to accept it.

I'm glad to have grown up in the countryside and played, and had to use my imagination rather than a TV and had to learn to act the hard way, to have dealt with the rejection. It's a life as well as a job, at the end the day, we all have to work for a living, but we have to have a life as well.

When you look at that period when Warhol and the Velvets and the Stones were doing things, it was this intersection of art and music. And then it went away.

So this is the space during tutoring hours. It's very busy. Same principles: one-on-one attention, complete devotion to the students' work and a boundless optimism and sort of a possibility of creativity and ideas.