When I’m writing a book, I start gathering material for years before I start writing it. I will find newspaper clippings, overheard dialogue, images that come to my head, sort of vague scenes from a plot, and I just make a huge, messy list of those things. I’m doing that for the next book, and I’ve been doing it for a long time, and I’m still not even close to being ready to start. Maybe in the fall I’ll start it, but I’m not on the cusp of starting it really. I’m just gathering that raw material. And what deserves to go in that document? It’s hard to say, but I know that things come together. I know that this article about Chinese surveillance definitely belongs in the same place with my son telling me about this dream he had. These are somehow connected. I have no idea how, but it’s just a feeling that I have, like an instinct. The Need and The Beautiful Bureaucrat very much began that way.

I write mostly in my bedroom. I don’t have a desk. I have at least 10 or 12 books that I’m reading at the time around me and I flip through different things. I have poems that I’m reading on my computer and I flip through those. I usually start by journaling. I journal every night, and that’s where most of my poems come from. Or notes in my phone that I pick through and Frankenstein morph into poems. In the end, it’s just me trying to boil down my gibberish and self-recriminations into some destruction and rebirth of me trying to give flesh to my memories.

We never enter into new recording projects thinking, “Yeah we’re gonna write something great here!” A lot of the time it’s a feeling like, can we write anything else? Is there anything else to say? You know what I mean? There’ll always be things to say, but if we can’t dress it up right, then it’s game over. It feels like a pretty honest place to start from: What is there to say?

In my early twenties I wrote quite a lot of a very bad novel called The Private Joke. I regularly abandoned it for months at a time to write other things, then picked it up again. Part of the manuscript was sitting up in the luggage rack when, aged 25, I was travelling by train from Manchester to London, and the idea for a very different kind of book hit me: that of a boy who didn’t realise he was a wizard, and was taken off to magic school.

Years ago, before I had my current manager, I was taken advantage of by people I’d trusted with my finances. That’s made me especially sensitive to the prospect of financial ruin. I’m constantly advising young athletes to be vigilant when it comes to whom you trust with your finances.

Dishonesty. It destroys relationships. It’s something celebrities especially have to guard against because people are prone to tell you what they think you want to hear rather than the truth.

Being surrounded by my friends and family. Just listening to them interacting, laughing, sharing. It is the culmination of everything I could have hoped for.

Barack Obama has shown us how to be a politician guided by intelligence, integrity, and compassion.

I don’t think that is tough, because if you have an idea of something meaningful to communicate, you can move forward on that. You might not be successful in communicating what you want to communicate, but at least you have an idea of something that needs to be said, or something that you think should be said, and I think you go from there.

I had self doubts when I was a freshman in high school. I was 14 years old and not very mature, and there were a few incidents in my freshman year. I learned in a very competitive environment. The high school environment that I played in was very intense, and I learned how to be stoic and go out and compete.