When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat.

You can see me still sitting here stunned. It'll get to me pretty soon, and you've got to deal with it.

There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, 'Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth.'

Juvenile salmon have a biological clock that begins ticking as soon as they begin their trip to the ocean. They need to undergo changes that will allow them to adapt from fresh water creatures to salt water creatures and arrive at the ocean at the same time their bodies have completed the transformation.