When I try to understand somebody, create a character, I fall into them. When I think writers are telling me what to think, I get harrumphy.

I like moral judgment to emerge from the reader. We are being sold a very simplistic morality by our leaders at a time when nuance and understanding are at a premium.

I enjoy thinking myself into other times and places. I don't like some of the conventions of the 'historical novel', but I think there's a way of doing it that has a lot of merit.

I realized I had a novel on my hands, but didn't know where it was going to go. So I thought, 'I'm going to do everything that you're not supposed to do when you plan a novel I'm going to step back and let this thing take itself wherever it wants to go, and I'm not going to worry about how things connect until later on.

Being in Harlem on the night of Barack Obama's election was extraordinary. It was the best street party I have ever gone to, and it felt like the period of American history which began with slavery had ended that evening.

These days we're all hyper-aware of the canonical way in which stories are supposed to play out - people are taught all about three-act scripting and where to put the reversal and all of that - and I think we can do more interesting narratives.

There are still some terrible cliches in the presentation of Indian fiction. The lotus flower. The hennaed hands. In mainland Europe, people still slap these images on my books and I go bananas.

I'm interested in complexity, in the mathematical sense, as well as the idiomatic sense. The idea of emergence - that it's possible for complex patterns to arise out of many simple interactions - is fascinating.

Critchley and Webster’s fierce, witty exploration of Hamlet makes most other writing about Shakespeare seem simpleminded.

But it's the particularity of a place, the physical experience of being in a place, that makes it onto the page. That's why I don't just do library research. I very rarely write about somewhere I haven't been.

I think it's important for all culturally literate people to understand the technological substrate of new developments.

There's nothing New York likes more than a thing. Or a place. Or a place that's a thing. Or a thing that happens to be a place.

Suburbia is all about private ownership and not having to share, and it leads to a paranoid, defensive mindset. I know this, having grown up in Essex.

I'm fascinated by the emergence of a global class. They're highly mobile they reject the idea of place.

There's an explosion of Indian fiction of all kinds, from military thrillers to chicklit. I think that's exciting.

I suffer from vertigo. It's paralyzing in extreme situations. The most scared I've been as an adult was trying to conquer that fear by going climbing in Wales.

There are things about our world that almost by their nature defy our ability to comprehend them. Some people use a religious register to deal with that - they call it God and that's a way of domesticating it.