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I always thought of the English landscape as being English gardens.

I have admired David Bromley's work for years. He possesses such a wild and vivid imagination and really sees the beauty in everything.

Some people have human muses - mine is a city. I feel a startling ambivalence towards London, but for better or worse my work has come utterly to depend upon it.

When I first came to London, I loved hanging around in cafes, smoking, scribbling, dreaming. It was life-affirming and fun.

London has always moved and surprised me, reinventing itself in ways both fresh and familiar. It's a contrary, complex and creative city, an anarchist of a thousand faces - fickle and unfailing, tender and bleak, ambitious and callous.

I'm very fond of an old map of London that used to belong to my father. I'm a big London fan, and the evolution of the city is astonishing, when you look back to Pepys and how small it was - everyone knew each other.

By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show.

If you're curious, London's an amazing place.

London has been used as the emblematic English city, but it's far from representative of what life in England is actually about.

For novelists, the imagination is everything. The trick is to guide one's imagination using research. I love using old maps. When I wrote my novels on London and New York, I found wonderful historical atlases. Paris has the most lavish maps of all.