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I don't generally believe in people being knighted.

I grew up reading a lot of fantasy/sci-fi. It was really all I read - anything from 'Dragonlance,' when I was 12, to 'The Wheel of Time' and Robert Jordan stuff, to George R.R. Martin, who did 'Game of Thrones.'

Peter Fleming was a famous English traveler, explorer and adventurer, whose non-fiction books were hugely successful. My father owned signed copies of all of them - he and Peter Fleming had become acquainted over some detail of set design at the Korda film studio in Shepperton - and I had read each of them with breathless adolescent excitement.

To be knighted, that would be amazing. I remember Alex Ferguson from Man Utd got it and Steve Redgrave - to be in the same category as them is amazing.

My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.

Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it's the wrong century.

When I was growing up in Ossining, N.Y., playing pool with the guys, the thought that any one of us might become an actor was as far-fetched as being knighted by the queen of England.

There are some tremendous actors in the U.K. who have been knighted, and I've spent much of my life admiring many of them, like Laurence Olivier. So it's very flattering to be in their company.

I know one author whose royalty income has been halved from £34,000 a year to £16,000.