'One of the most privileged existences you can imagine'

‘Don't believe any novelist who tells you it's all agony. It's actually one of the most privileged existences you can imagine - assuming you can live by it...

I couldn't write all the time. As a writer, you have to come out into the world. I don't have a Salinger or Pynchon impulse. There are so many things to do that are interesting. I do half a dozen literary festivals a year. The pleasure of festivals is meeting up with other authors and friends...

I think I will write, in my 70s, more novellas. I love the idea of sitting down to read something in three hours - about the length of an opera, or a long movie, or a play where all of its structure can be held in the mind. A novella is a great length, and it's a demanding genre in which things have to be settled quickly.'

Ian McEwan, author of The Children Act, in the Observer