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The idea for The Art of the Engine Driver came from a dream of my old street. It was so vivid – virtual, you might say – that I abandoned the project I had in mind and followed the dream.

Living life in only one dimension, without having another world or set of characters to visit, doesn’t seem enough. I’m always happier when I’m writing, and not so easy to live with when I’m not.

I write for a reader, any reader – just one – who is willing to participate on a creative level in the experience of my book. I do not plan my novels, and I think if I ever did I would lose interest in finishing them. Nor do I ever alter the order in which the narrative unfolds. Otherwise, how would I keep track of what my reader knows and doesn’t know? I don’t care about plot. Instead, the aim is to transmogrify experience. What drives me is the music of the sentence. It’s all about a shared energy with the reader. That’s what fires me up.

It’s a thrill to build up a story and to inhabit characters. I’m alone and not alone – in touch with layers of life I’m not able to savour when I’m living it.

During the day. I love reverie. It’s underrated. As T.E. Lawrence put it: ‘The dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream, to make it possible. This I did.’

To find cogency, peace, quiet, and joy; to practise radical attention to the world, to be an activist through words, and to forge solidarity through imagination.

I wish we had critics reviewing books who weren’t writers or academics but who were simply passionate readers involved in various walks of life. At present, criticism seems a mixed bag. Some reviewers are terrific, others seem to merely describe rather than come to grips adequately with what they are reviewing.

Many of my dreams have to do with the sea. Sometimes they concern Antarctica, an exciting prelude to going into the interior with other people.

Why do you write?

It is the one ambition I’ve ever had. Some bleak days I think that my desire to write is no more than an unshakeable habit. On other days I think that writing allows me to have and make other worlds. All the difficulty of writing is in service to this freedom. Also, the habit of writing renews experience: it makes me notice things with a new distance and curiosity, and wonder how they might work in writing; it means that I always have something to think about on the train.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Yes, but my most vivid dreams are nightmares. They make me glad to wake. I miss the dreams of flying that I had when I was growing up.