Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that's my problem.
Also I had financial worries because it took four years to write and we were living off my wife's income all that time, which wasn't very great.
As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife's money and little bits I was picking up for journalism.
As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?
As the books grew bigger and more ambitious, the situations in question sometimes became political ones, and so it became necessary to start painting in the social background on a scale which eventually became panoramic.
But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.
But I have always - ever since The Accidental Woman - written novels about individuals attempting to make choices in the context of situations over which they have no control.
But we are entitled to look for continuity in politics.
But you can try to read books at the wrong time or for the wrong reasons.
Contemporary Britain seems an endlessly fascinating place to me - but if I knew a little bit more about other places, and other times, maybe it wouldn't.
Dickens, obviously, is a great hero.
I became quite taken over by Johnson's personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it.
I don't know, I don't really have a view about what my contemporaries are doing, except that I enjoy individual writers and so on.
I have to constantly rein in my nostalgia for the 1970s, in case it takes me over and I become one of those grumpy old men who just talks about how much better life was when he was a kid.
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.
I like the idea of a big caesura between the narratives, a space which readers can fill in with their own speculative history.
I live a perfectly happy and comfortable life in Blair's Britain, but I can't work up much affection for the culture we've created for ourselves: it's too cynical, too knowing, too ironic, too empty of real value and meaning.
I think it's also the case that I'm not as widely travelled, or as well-educated in history, as most of the other novelists I meet: so I have to write about my own country, at the present time, because it's more or less all I know about!
I was mainly in a state of nervousness while I wrote it - nervousness that it was far bigger and more complicated than anything I'd attempted before, and that maybe my talent just wasn't up to it and the book would have to be abandoned, or would turn out not to work at all when it was finished.
I'm one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood.
I'm shy of comparisons to Dickens because he's one of the absolute greats and it's silly to compare a contemporary novelist with someone.
I'm trying to write a nonfiction book at the moment, slot it in between the novels, and it really is like wading through quicksand compared to writing fiction.
It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political.
It's only a drawback in the States, where most people seem to have no real interest in other countries and the notion of a novel which might offer insight into life in the UK doesn't seem to appeal very widely.
Luckily, in my case, I have managed, by writing, to do the one thing that I always wanted to do.
My only regret is that I signed away the world rights and in America they've been far and away my most successful books, but I never saw a cent from any of it.
Revisionist historians are about to get their hands on the Thatcher years, she's probably going to be looked at again because she feels far enough away now, and we don't see her much on the political landscape in this country, she's kind of disappeared and she doesn't speak out much anymore.
So it was primarily a desire to write about that period in one's life rather than that period in history or in British culture or whatever.
So no, I'm pleased if it's been influential for many readers, but at the time I didn't even know that it was going to have any readers.
Someone emailed me and said The Closed Circle reminded them of reading Trollope.
Thatcherism has become bigger than she ever was.
The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest personal relationships with my translators - I don't know whether that's a coincidence, or if there's something to be learned from it.
The fact that it was a TV sitcom rather than a literary novel is neither here nor there, as far as I'm concerned.
The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's.
The writer I feel the most affinity with - you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they're 18th century novels - is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he's the guy who does it for me.
They were written in the early '90s when I was strapped for cash.
Well, mainly it's because I'm not a writer who's comfortable with writing about periods that I can't remember firsthand.
Writers never feel comfortable having labels attached to them, however accurate they are.
You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it.
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