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I feel like I'm the only person - or woman, at least - who hasn't read 'Fifty Shades of Grey.'

I've been careful to keep my life separate because it's important to me to have privacy and for my life not to be a marketing device for a movie or a TV show. I'm worth more than that.

Whether your audience is in a sweaty basement club or nestled in a favourite armchair, good money has been paid, and attention has got to be grabbed if you are not to be heckled off the stage or find your novel discarded in favour of the latest volume of 'Fifty Shades of Whatever.'

Overall I enjoy a certain anonymity. I live a very normal, very ordinary life.

My anonymity is something I treasure.

I enjoyed having a reputation as being wild, but these days I try not to worry about what people think in the privacy of their own brain or what they write in the bizarre publicity of their own newspapers, because all of those things are meaningless.

I am quite fortunate, because I can still be quite incognito. If you go out looking for attention, then you'll attract it, but if you're just getting on with your life, particularly in London where everyone is engrossed in what they're doing, you can keep a measure of anonymity.

You can't live in your own secluded world. If you're not on the Tube, on the bus doing normal things, how can you relate to people?

The only person you need to be credible to is yourself. When you stand in front of the mirror and nobody is watching, are you happy with yourself?

Life is so fast these days, and we're exposed to so much information. Television makes us a witness to such misery.