I get to my desk (in a very small room at the top of the house) at about 10, and fiddle about with the height of the desk and the chair until I’m comfortable. I have a desk that I can raise or lower according to the state of my aching back. Sometimes I stand at it, and sometimes I have it high up to write at, and sometimes a bit lower to type.

Stay in your mental pyjamas all day. […] Work in the morning, a short break for lunch, work in the afternoon and then watch the six o’clock news and then go back to work until bed-time. Before bed, listen to Schubert, preferably some songs.

I used to be a late starter, but now I get up in the dark like a medieval monk, commit unmediated scribble to a notebook, and go back to bed about six, hoping to sleep for another two hours and to wake slowly and in silence. Random noise, voices in other rooms, get me off to a savage, disorderly start, but if I am left in peace to reach for a pen, I feel through my fingertips what sort of day it is.

When I’m working on a novel I type the initial draft first thing in the morning. Really: first thing. For preference, I have a cigarette ready-rolled and a coffee percolator loaded the night before; then I simply roll out of bed, fuel up and set to it. I believe the dreaming and imagining faculties are closely related, such that wreathed in night-time visions I find it possible to suspend disbelief in the very act of making stuff up.

C. S. Lewis - his works were very, very important during my time there. We had discussion groups. I did become more attracted to it although I still attended the Methodist church. If you read Lewis. Then until this day, he did the lectures, something like christian behaviour and 'the screwtape letters', and we were all discussing them. I thought some of his work was the most illuminating to people reaching out to christianity because you're always questioning particularly at that age and you're looking for reassurance and for answers. Indeed you go on questioning throughout your life.

You never follow the crowd. You work things out for yourself. And therefore if you think differently from the crowd, you must put your own view and try to get people taking your line. But you never follow the crowd. You never do things just because other people are doing them.