"... The way I think I write is by creating the actual raw material of fiction first of all, rather rapidly, very quickly, and then this has to be turned into a story or novel. I get quite a lot of manuscripts that people send me, young people asking me what I think of them. And almost all of them are still raw material which hasn’t been pushed or stretched or chopped up in order to give it form. What they’ve done is just to start the job but they haven’t completed it. You have to start with a mess, which is rather like the mess we all live in in the world, you know. You start with that mess and you really have got to create for yourself in your fiction. And then, the next thing you do is to make that palatable for the reader. The reader is terribly, terribly important because without the reader, as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing. It’s a kind of relationship, sometimes almost a friendship."