I take a lot from everywhere. I take from music architecture novels and plays. Anywhere that hits you.

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

As an editor I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel 'The Lifeboat ' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night and I really wanted my company to publish it but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment neither of them all that conventional but I'm not ready to choose between them yet let alone settle down to the process of writing.

A book is sent out into the world and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible Homer Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

I know that books I have written will still resonate in 50 years - particularly 'My Sister's Keeper.' It has sold three million copies in the States alone. I strongly feel that as a novelist you have a platform and the ability to change people's minds.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K. but it's of no account.

One already feels like an anachronism writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country.

When you're my age and you see a story you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt.

As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well as it turned out I never wrote a great novel sadly and I never converted to Catholicism happily but I did do one thing he did. That is in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.