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I consider myself a writer who writes about American expatriates. And if I have any overt cause as a writer besides writing the best prose I can, it's to try to make Americans have a more visceral feeling about how America impacts everybody in the world.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

Everyone assumes that novelists are smarter and more interesting. They're generally smarter and more interesting, but they're often very short. So it kind of cancels all the smart and interesting stuff out.

Every novelist has a different purpose - and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.

Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.

In some ways. I always feel between worlds, between cultures, and I think that's not necessarily a bad place for a writer to be. Writers are kind of on the fringe anyway, observing, writing things down. I'm still mostly American, but it's a nice tension.

Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will live in several places at once. That is both our curse and our charm.

It's only a drawback in the States, where most people seem to have no real interest in other countries and the notion of a novel which might offer insight into life in the UK doesn't seem to appeal very widely.

I obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world.

The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.