As a novelist, I'm incredibly lucky to make a living, but that doesn't mean that I don't lie awake at four o'clock in the morning, worrying.

You can live your whole life not realising that what you're looking for is right in front of you.

I’m incredibly lucky to still be around, doing all the things I want to do and getting extremely well paid for it. There’s a parallel with golf—a lot of it is in the mind, and the moment you start to lose the enthusiasm or appetite, it affects your judgments and decisions. And then you stop performing well. I think enthusiasm and appetite are more important than anything.

To work all the time is to be incredibly lucky.

I woke the next morning and became a novelist,

This might sound really foolish, but when I came to Edinburgh in 1988 I had spent nearly all my life living south of Bristol, and I was just amazed that a city like Edinburgh was actually in the British isles.