I do some of my best thinking while pulling weeds.

I think the Bravo test is really important for a number of reasons. It's kind of symbolic. It raises a lot of the issues that are related to the whole controversy over nuclear testing.

In Japan, it becomes a huge issue in terms of not just the government and its protest against the United States, but all different groups and all different peoples in Japan start to protest.

There are all kinds of letters and protests that come from, not surprisingly, Japanese fishermen, the fishermen's wives; there are student groups, all different types of people; the protest against the Americans' use of the Pacific for nuclear testing.

There was a lot of protest after Bravo, from countries like India, for example. India was the first country which came forward and proposed at the United Nations that all of these nuclear tests should be stopped, that there should be a complete ban on nuclear testing.

Then there was the whole concept of coal mining, which is a culture unto itself, the most dangerous occupation in the world, and which draws and develops a certain kind of man.

I feel very bad about getting things wrong.

I hate to be categorized.

I never thought I would just be doing Arkady books.

I'd always been a great fan of George Orwell.

I'm very aware when I'm speaking to the English of how flat my Mid-Atlantic American voice is.

I've always been struck by how unsuspicious people are in general, if you tell them what you're about.

I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.

The fact is that I loved being in England.

The great thing about being a writer is that you are always recreating yourself.

There is a huge antipathy in England between the north and the south, the working class and the owning class.

But at the same time I went down into the mines with working miners who are still young men, younger than I am, who are aware that their working life is coming to an end and they feel suddenly cut off.

I have another Russian idea, too, with a place and a period, so I guess I have enough to keep me busy for quite some time, especially considering that I'm such a slow writer.

If you take the contempt some Americans have for yuppies and multiply it by 10 you might come close to understanding their attitude towards the City, as they call it - London, the people of the south.

Most people - and particularly people whose lives have nothing to do with books at all - are intrigued by the idea that somebody wants to listen to them and get it right.