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It's not like being a writer is a very lucrative career, but you know, you just know when you've found what you're really meant to do.

People don't really know themselves until they're 30. Like most people nowadays, I went to university, got a degree and wandered for a bit. I trained to be a chartered accountant, which I didn't much enjoy, and it was only slowly that the idea of becoming a creative writer gelled.

I've had a very interesting career. I get to do amazing things and work with amazing people and travel and learn languages - things most people don't get the opportunity to do.

I always knew I wanted to be a writer. I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do as a money-making job.

My generation's parents told their children, 'Become an accountant, a lawyer, or an engineer; that will give you a solid foothold in the middle class.' But these jobs are now being sent overseas. So in order to make it today, you have to do work that's hard to outsource, hard to automate.

It's like Forrest Gump said, 'Life is like a box of chocolates.' Your career is like a box of chocolates - you never know what you're going to get. But everything you get is going to teach you something along the way and make you the person you are today. That's the exciting part - it's an adventure in itself.

Ultimately, I want to have a good career and do interesting work.

I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation.

I obviously enjoy being wealthy. It's enabled me to have a career that I've chosen and not one that I've been forced into.

Naturally, it was easier for me to envision becoming a novelist than it is for most people. I had two great in-house teachers; I had parents who considered a career in the arts a real possibility rather than a dreamy arrow shot into the sky.