After university, I went into film. I started out making tea, managed a brief stint as an assistant director, then found myself writing a screenplay. In the end, I wrote quite a few - but by January 2006, I wanted out.

Suddenly, the idea of writing a book was like coming home. I didn't tell anyone except my wife, Clare. I just began.

There is not now, nor I suspect will there ever be, a le Carre novel with ninjas in it. Most serious novelists are wary of including ninjas in their writing. That's a shame, because many much-admired works of modern fiction could benefit from a few.

I'm not shy, exactly, but I am private. I don't like to talk about myself. I had to learn - I was interviewed for print, radio and even TV.

My reading of history is that we continually inherit trouble.

I'm fascinated by human agency - by the process of decision, both in the individual and the mass.

I studied revolutions at university, and I think each revolution must begin with a moment of 'no.' If enough people have that moment at the same time, it becomes a movement.

I am an avid reader of comics, though I came to them late.

'Gone-Away World' was a shotgun blast, an explosion out of the box I'd put myself into writing film scripts. 'Tigerman' is shorter, tighter, more crafted.

I wrote the first draft of 'Tigerman' while my wife was pregnant - needless to say, I was relaxed and casual about her well-being during this tender time - and the novel clearly has its center in that panicked parental desperation that accompanies a first child and in the admittedly comedic extremes to which it drives us.

With true free speech has to come an understanding of when and when not to use it. But you can't legislate that. It must be voluntary - especially in a world where a whisper can reach a million people in an eye blink.

Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century.

In the span of a human lifetime, and well within the collective memory, Britain went from a stable imperial power ruling an appreciable fraction of the Earth's surface to being a tumultuous patchwork which was at least superficially in decline.

The end doesn't justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means.

Cheese is good. And Britain, despite the grumblings of the French and the outrage of the Swiss, not to mention some plucky challenges from Italy, Austria, and Spain, has some of the best cheese in the world. We're world leaders in cheese.

At the heart of both democracy and capitalism is a simple assumption that, across the board, people make free and relatively rational decisions: that we are, to borrow a medical term, Gillick Competent.

We simply cannot afford to allow our government to go unscrutinised, most of all in amid the bleak seeming imperatives of the 'war on terror'.

My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler.

I'm an irredeemable urbanite. I can't imagine living more than a five-minute walk from my fellow human beings. Other people are vital to my peace of mind.

I make up names for people all the time - it's part of writing. Very often, the name comes with the character, along with of a sense of who they are and what they do.

In both 'Tigerman' and my first book, 'The Gone-Away World,' there are characters who never really get names. They're too fundamentally who they are to be bound by a name, so I couldn't give them one.

To my irritation, you still can't flick through an ebook properly; you can't riffle the pages, you can't look at more than one page at once.

Throughout the '90s and early 2000s, our financial industry and governments leaned on a snake-oil mirage of wealth creation, a bubble predicated on the obvious falsehood that things could only get better.

In abandoning the understanding that things - services, goods, wars, and houses - have costs, we risk becoming infantilised, incapable of making decisions about government or finance, and perhaps above all about the environment, the wellbeing of the planet upon which we depend and which our children will inherit from us.

Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player.

Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method.

I'm usually reading too many books - in fact, I'm usually reading enough books that if the stack fell on me, I'd be injured.

I work in our living room, a strange room in a strange, topsy-turvy house. I work underneath this enormous bookshelf.

I used desperately to want to be a brooding hero from literature, but I'm optimistic, healthy and fair-haired.

My books are written from the heart, to entertain: they're books I would like to read. Because of that, when I meet people who like them, we have so much to talk about!

In ancient Greece, Socrates reportedly didn't fancy a literate society. He felt that people would lose the capacity to think for themselves, simply adopting the perspective of a handy written opinion, and that they would cease to remember what could be written down.

It's true that interacting through text means no eyelines, no facial expressions, no tone of voice. That can be an advantage, helping us to consider content rather than eloquence, import rather than source.

The Internet has the capacity to extend to us genuine choice, and that is not without risk. Real power does entail real responsibility.

An enormous amount of a writer's life is performance. I find myself wondering, at the moment, whether I do too much of it.

I'm caught somewhere between introversion and extroversion. Performance is natural to me, joyful, but it is also exhausting. I can feed on it, but the expense is high, too, like being a carnivore: I have to chase down my meals.

Victorian theorists competed to identify how many biologically differentiated races lived on Earth and proposed inherent characteristics for them, formulated explanations for these presumed variations in humanity.

Steampunk appeals to the idea of uniqueness, to the one-off item, while every mainstream consumer technology of recent years is about putting human beings into ever more granular, packageable and mass-produced identities so that they can be sold or sold to, perfectly mapped and understood.

I'm a white, middle-aged, married, middle-class male with kids. I couldn't be disenfranchised if I tried.

Professional politicians will say anything, and they're always careful to leave themselves room to turn around and do the other.

I want a politics that doesn't need to pretend to be holy or perfect or infallible. I want a politics that gets on with it.

A lot of author events are basically hour-long classes in entropy perched on bad seating under bright, hard lights, with - if you're lucky - bad Chardonnay and cheese on a stick waiting for you at the end of the ride.

Performance is hard. I know this. I really enjoy it, but I have bombed, I have fluffed, and I have said the wrong thing.

All my characters are me, in one way or another.

Yes, you are under surveillance. Yes, it is odious. Yes, it should bother you. And yes, it's hard to know how to avoid it.

The notion of our leaders as patrician ascetics of unassailable virtue is risible.

We tend to assume that data is either private or public, either owned by one person or shared by many. In fact there's more to it than that, above and beyond the upsetting reality that private data is now anything but.

Knowledge is not just power - it is control.