I never have to look far for inspiration. Why should I, when all I need do is read the newspaper every day? All the ingredients of tragedy, comedy, and social satire are there, screaming out to be used. The difficulty is deciding which ideas to pick. My basic response is always the same: when in doubt, choose a big one. A novel is a long-haul flight of fancy, and there’s no point piloting something whose engine is going to start spluttering half-way through. You have to be gripped enough, or intrigued enough – or perhaps even baffled enough – to keep sight of your theme. All my novels are novels of ideas: I need a whopping – maybe even unmanageably big – theme to get me going. That’s not to say I know what my conclusion is before I begin. In fact the opposite. I begin in a state of cluelessness – because for me, writing is an integral part of the thinking process. Often it’s only when I’ve read what I’ve written that I begin to understand what I think. I know I’m not the only writer to experience this. It’s a very exciting feeling, because you really are quite far from being in control: it’s your subconscious that’s in charge – and it’s always much cleverer than you are. In the case of Egg Dancing, I had been fascinated by genetic engineering for some time – and I’d also just had a baby. For me, the Frankenstein myth is a very powerful one, and I wanted to re-work it – but in a small, domestic, suburban ‘this-could-be-you’ sort of way. So I came up with the idea of a scientist who created the Perfect Baby, using his own wife (the heroine) as a guinea-pig. With Ark Baby, I wanted to explore the relationship between humans and animals, because I had always been intrigued by our wildly illogical approach to other species: we sentimentalise, kill, anthropomorphise, imprison, worship, fear, exploit, adore, torture, respect and eat animals – on a daily basis – without any sense of our own hypocrisy. So I created a hero who is literally half ape, but doesn’t know it: his story, in Ark Baby, is the story of how humans can accommodate the animal self that’s within. The Paper Eater was inspired by a trip to my local hypermarket, where I began to realise that a shopping centre is in some ways a mini-state. So in this story, I created an island dystopia run on commercial lines, based on a hypermarket model of ‘people-management’. The citizens (known as ‘customers’) think they’re in Heaven – but of course it turns out to be Hell. The things that make me laugh the most – the most bitterly, I suppose – are the things that make normal people just want to cry. I want to cry too, but I find laughter a lot more therapeutic. And I want to pass it on. I think what I’m saying is that as pessimists go, I am extremely optimistic.