Susanna Clarke

I can write most places. I particularly like writing on trains. Being between places is quite liberating, and looking out of the window, watching a procession of landscapes and random-ish objects, is very good for stories.

I had always been fascinated by comics, but it had taken me several weeks to make up my mind to buy 'Watchmen'; for someone on a publisher's assistant's salary, it was some quite unheard-of sum of money.

If I'm serious, yes, I'd like to have done what Shakespeare did... to act and write. You learn so much from acting. One of our great writers, Alan Bennett, does both supremely well. When I write a story, I tend to speak it aloud as I'm writing it.