Describe your latest project.
If you're writing genre fiction it's simple enough (Dinosaurs attack London! Terrified woman discovers human head in boyfriend's suitcase! Boy wizard battles Dark Side!). But I have always found it difficult to describe my work.

In fact I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe. Think of some of the best novels in the world — Madame Bovary, To the Lighthouse, Pride and Prejudice — then try to sum them up in fifty words. They all sound crap.

So, I always sidestep the question by saying A Spot of Bother is a hilarious black comedy about skin cancer, nervous breakdown, graphic self-harm and lusty gay sex. Which is true, in part...

Writers are better liars than other people: true or false? Why, or not?
Better than bank robbers? Better than serial adulterers? Better than nuns?

I think one of the things you have to learn if you're going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people. On the other hand I'm sure there are many writers who are absolutely rubbish liars. Indeed I am repeatedly astonished by the number of really good writers who understand human beings so well on paper but don't know how to deal with them in real life.

For the record, I am a very, very good liar. If you want my top-tips...

a) Don't make a habit of it. Lie only when absolutely necessary.

b) Don't be Clintonesque. Don't try to say things which are technically true if viewed in the right light with a following wind. If you are going to lie, lie.

c) Keep as near to the truth as possible. Limit the number of ways in which you can be contradicted by real events.

What is your favorite literary first line?

Diffugere nives, redeunt iam gramina campis aboribusque comae.

The Snows have fled, now grass returns to the fields and leaves to the trees.

How did the last good book you read end up in your hands and why did you read it?
Earlier in the year I did a Nature Poetry event at the Hay Literary Festival with Ruth Padel. She suggested I read Wild Reckoning beforehand. It's a wide-ranging anthology of poems published to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. It's good in its own right, but more importantly (for me, at least) it contained a short passage from The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney which I am now reading with huge enjoyment. Written in the late sixteenth century it's a sprawling, heroical, pastoral romance, a precursor of the modern novel. It is surprisingly moving and psychologically acute. It also contains the most wonderful language. Few writers, short of Shakespeare, use metaphor as well as Sidney does.

A tiny example... The human hand is described, in passing, as "the instrument of instruments."

Think about that for a moment. How many things it means. How right they all are. How economically expressed.

Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.

Chicago's avenues as white as Poland.
A blizzard of heavenly coke hushes the ghettoes.
The scratched sky flickers like a TV set.
Down Michigan Avenue, slow as the glacial prose
of historians my taxi crawls.

Name the best Simpsons episode of all time, and explain why it's the best.
"Time and Punishment," the one where Homer "mends" the toaster, accidentally turns it into a time machine, and finds himself repeatedly sucked back to the Jurassic period where he keeps squashing something, thereby altering the course of evolution with horrific consequences. There's a crescendo of high-density jokes at the end which made me almost sick with laughter the first time I saw. If I make any attempt to describe the jokes I'll kill them stone dead. But anyone who's seen the episode will remember the bit where it rains donuts.

Actually, to be precise, "Time and Punishment" is a mini-episode contained with the Treehouse of Horror V Halloween special, which also contains the rather wonderful "Nightmare Cafeteria" where the staff at Bart's school are killing, cooking and eating the children...

Aside from other writers, name some artists from whom you draw inspiration and talk a little about their work.
Gerhard Richter, Willem de Kooning, Patrick Heron, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Orchestra Baobab, Elliott Carter, Steve Reich, Daniel Johnston, Billy Bragg, Jean Dubuffet, Mogwai, Sparklehorse, Wolfgang Tillmans...

I think all writing about painting and music misses the point (in much the same way that writing a song about a novel misses the point), so if you don't know some of those names and you're intrigued, I suggest you get onto Google Images or visit your nearest quality record store...

Dogs, cats, budgies or turtles?
Turtles. In their natural habitat, preferably. I have very fond memories of swimming in Walden Pond when we lived in Boston. You'd swim past a log and see all these turtles sunning themselves. Slightly disturbing if you thought about how many more were swimming around your toes, but also rather wonderful.