I remember, the first few years here, I didn't like London much: too big, too crowded, the physical difficulty of getting around.

I don't answer the phone or do my email; I don't do anything until I've got the day's writing done. I have a word count for every day: 500 for fiction, 1,000 for non-fiction, and journalism is 1,500. That's a level I can sustain.

When I first travelled to New York in 1982 on a summer holiday as a student, I remember thinking how exciting it was, how energising it felt, and also how it felt dangerous - it was a place where you could make a wrong turn, either geographically or just in a human interaction, and suddenly find yourself in trouble.

Once you learn to 'speak' money - which is what I felt I did through the research that led me to write 'Whoops!' - you start to see it at work all around you. It's like a language, a code written on the surface of things; it's in flow all around us, all the time.

By the time I was three years old, I'd lived at 10 different addresses in six different countries.

My mother was very proud of being Irish and being a Gunnigan in a straightforward way.

Most people find they have to worry about money; if you don't ever, then in some fundamental way, you are cut off from most people.

I'm an omniviorous reader, but I don't read what could overlap with my own work. It's like tuning a radio frequency - it's much harder to pick up if there's something else there.

'Austerity' is a real weasel word because it's an attempt to make something value-based and abstract out of something which, in reality, consists simply of spending cuts.

Now that I'm an adult and have a big say in what we eat on Christmas Day, turkey doesn't even make it on to the starting grid for consideration. It isn't just my least favourite meat; it's my least favourite protein.

A lot of the time in modern Britain, certainly in urban life, we barely have any contact at all with the people around us.

Some things get clearer as you look back on them.

At the risk of being old-fartish, I like old-school wines that taste the way the winemaker intended, as opposed to organic and untreated ones with more bottle variation. If I want to take a risk, I'll go bungee-jumping.

Fact doesn't have to be plausible; it just has to be fact.

The 'stuff' in novels touches on every aspect of the world and people's lives. That's what makes it so remarkable just how little there is in the novel about the world of money.

We can all instinctively understand the idea of life insurance; most of us will feel an instinctive repugnance at the thought of the viatical industry, or 'dead peasants insurance.' As market thinking penetrated the life insurance industry, a moral line was crossed, and the application of market ideas was taken too far.

One of the things that happens to you if you write about restaurants - one of the reasons restaurant critics are the real heroes - is that whenever anyone has a grievance about any aspect of the business, they tell you about it.

As an outsider to and observer of the restaurant business, one of the things I most admire about it is the risks people are willing to take.

Obviously you can stash money under your mattress, cut down on hazelnut lattes, but in terms of the larger economic frame of our lives, we have very little agency. About one of the only things you can do is understand it.

I do believe in that thing about the reading audience being very important to the formation of the novel at its birth.

Money isn't automatically freedom. You need to look carefully at what you're doing to earn the money before you can conclude that you are, in practice, free. This is a cost-benefit analysis we should all perform on our own lives.

Video games are the first new artistic medium since television, but they are more different from television than television was from cinema; they are the newest new thing since the arrival of the movies just over a century ago.

We don't want to think about money in an ideal life; in a well-lived life, money wouldn't be one of our primary concerns, and we prefer to adopt the ostrich position.

I love London in the rare parts of the year when it's quiet, and no time is more reliably quiet than the week between Christmas and New Year.