If you're going to write about something it becomes a damn sight more interesting than if you're not going to write about it, because you engage with it actively in a way that you wouldn't if you were just passing through or if you were going to St Helens to visit family or if it was a place that made you resentful because you'd always wanted to escape from there.
I genuinely find it difficult to think of places that I'd never want to see again. It might be because part of my career has been concerned with writing about topography.
As primitive as digital can be, there is nothing automatic in the methods I use, it's all basically done by hand. I know nothing about computers. I don't like computers. I use them for writing because I have to. I have never had a conversation about computers in my life.
I don't think things necessarily should have a meaning. If stuff has a meaning then why do [writing] about it? If you're trying to say, 'Tall buildings are great' why not just leave it at that: "Tall buildings are great."
When I started writing fiction it always seemed in retrospect (I didn't realise at the time) that it was always caused by environments rather than by incidents and characters.
When I first started writing in my early 20s it was literary criticism for a very eccentric magazine called Books And Bookmen, which allowed me to write, more or less anything.
