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It probably helps that my background is in the sciences and I can speak the scientists' language.

I have expertise in five different fields which helps me to easily understand the analogy between my scientific problems and those occurring in nature.

I'm dependent on writing for a living, so really it's to my advantage to understand how the creative process works. One of the problems is, when you start to do that, in effect you're going to have to step off the edge of science and rationality.

I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren't really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening.

A lot of what I do - I have to try and make sense of things before I can make nonsense of them.

In some ways I'm a frustrated scientist or mathematician. The amount of times I've thought I'd go back to university and do theoretical physics because I like the big questions, but really I know now that that's not quite me. What's me is to do it in novels.

You can't do science in a novel, but you can do philosophy. Or, if you're really lucky, you can manage to pose a question in such a way that other people will take it on.

I read, I study, I examine, I listen, I think, and out of all that I try to form an idea into which I put as much common sense as I can.

I get passionate about certain subjects, and then I'll write a whole play around it.

I can be a bit of a science geek. I tend more towards reading about brain science, neuroscience.