New Orleans music is really about three things: Good songs, good funk and a good time.

I'm not happy with just repeating myself.

I like to push characters to extremes so they have to make really tough decisions and there is no life more extreme than that of an athlete.

I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn't the most athletic guy at school.

I'm a much better writer for being a father.

I'm always determined that as a novelist I'm going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.

I'm really interested in people's decisions.

If I can't write it would be as if I died.

My whole life is my work.

The Daily Mail can't say 'asylum-seeker' without saying 'foreign criminal' in the same sentence. I'm sure it's practically editorial policy.

There's what people say, and there's what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.

This thing with being lovers, it isn't like being married.

I think that the relationship between two top-level athletes who are rivals is one of the most fascinating human relationships to explore. It's always one atom away from being a tragedy.

I think that there's something extremely beautiful about the Olympic ideal and its motto - 'Swifter, higher, stronger' - it's such a beautiful motto, and it celebrates everything which is the antithesis of death and dissolution and entropy.

It's extremely hard for athletes to accept what's happened to them sometimes. It's hard to be beaten by a small margin, and I've spoken with athletes who, for years afterward, have been tormented by the knowledge that, had they done something ever so slightly different, they could have been one-ten-thousandth of a second quicker.

Studying psychology is fun because you're always looking for the same things I think a writer should be looking for, which is the story behind the story.

The reason why I love people, and writing about them, is because they don't always respond with hate and anger. If they did I wouldn't have a story to tell. Who wants to know about someone who was brutalised and became brutal? I'm interested in the exceptions.