My philosophy is to enjoy yourself. Do the things you want to do, like play golf!

My acting career began when I walked into a drama school class run by Anna Scher in Islington. Anna discovered a lot of people: Linda Robson, Pauline Quirke, Gary and Martin Kemp, and Dexter Fletcher were among my contemporaries.

When I was a kid doing television, they'd stick a leather jacket on me, and I would be the thug.

Acting is a tough industry. There are a lot of kids out there at drama schools and not a lot of money about, especially as the arts are being cut.

My problem is that the audience is more fiction-literate than ever. In Shakespeare's day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life; today you experience four or five different kinds of fiction every day. So staying ahead of the audience is impossible.

To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding.

The decision in my case to become a stay-at-home dad, which people do all the time, I guess wouldn't have meant as much to people if I had had a very simple kind of make-a-living existence and decided I needed to spend more time at home.

A theme in a lot of my books - and in my own life - is making choices that you feel you should make, or what society wants you to make, as opposed to what is truly right for you.