I come from a privileged background but I worked a lot of winter seasons in the Alps and I've done lots of mundane summer jobs back in Britain where I mixed with less well off people. Maybe it comes from there but I've always felt that it's our duty to make society fairer.

I'm a hardened atheist but I feel that we have an inbuilt need for God. If you eradicate religion, you end up with something terrible in its place, like the communist state, as in Russia or China, where the dictator becomes the messiah figure.

You are supposed to look at the unimproved and think about the way that we dismiss so-called 'chavs' and certain immigrant classes that are considered unworthy, the undeserving poor. Those kind of prejudices are getting worse.

Living in France means I see the UK in snapshots. There is something quite nice about being in exile and the things you remember about places tend to be the most vivid details. You don't get that when you see somewhere every day.

When I start writing for the day, I usually read aloud the chapter I'm working on. It gets me into it and illuminates mistakes. I'm very rhythm conscious and I do enjoy repetition.

I'm slightly pessimistic about human nature, about how close it's possible to bond with those around you. Dying alone is a deep fear for most people. I'm not scared of death but I'm scared of dying scared. Maybe everything else in life comes from those two points: the separation anxiety of childhood and the ultimate fear of dying alone.

At the moment we seem to be heading in the opposite direction. However you dress it up, it's pretty obvious who is being affected by the government's cuts.

I debated whether or not to pin the setting down to a particular date but in the end I decided to leave things vague. It depends how fast technology improves.

What I imagined doesn't require anti-gravity beams or anything too spectacular, just advances in analysing different genes, finding out what they can do and recombining them.

New technologies are a good thing but we must consider how they will impact on us so that, when they become achievable, they aren't allowed to run amok.

I do always know where I'm going in my books. I know the endpoint. I've written only two thousand words of my next novel but I know what the ending will be already.