There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.

That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.

With the young writers now it’s F and C all day long, which he, personally, finds boring.

Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so there wasn’t as much pressure to present a respectable exterior. And secondly, there was no social media. So if you were found face down on the floor – people did do that quite a bit; usually men, but not always – or fell through plate glass windows or got into scrapes, it became a rumour, and rumours are hard to pin down.