New York was very congenial to me when I was young, like most people. I met my comrades in arms and partied hard. It's the way it should be, and then you get sick of it.
Many travelers get into trouble in places like Dubai by assuming that it is sufficiently Western for them to drink as they do back home. But elsewhere in the Muslim world, it is quite controlled, and the non-Muslim will be steered down a fairly narrow path.
Muslims do drink, as anyone who has spent a wild weekend with Saudi booze tourists in Bahrain will know. Those Saudi tourists are like teenage girls in Manchester on a Saturday night. But each country and region is different.
I've got everything against likable characters. Likable characters are usually completely forgettable, and we don't really care. I think we love villains... precisely because they show us these disturbing complexities that I don't think nice characters do.
So many writers live their whole lives in rooms. You can be too civilised in the environment you have around you, too oriented towards speaking engagements and literary festivals and dinner parties. That has no interest for me these days. You get to a point where you don't care anymore. At that point, you can start to write.
Boredom and sexual desire are a potent and explosive combination, and people will certainly risk their lives to exit a grey and boring life.
I spent a fair amount of time in Communist Poland when I was young - my wife was from there - and I had the impression that boredom was one of the things that was undermining that whole society from the inside.
In 'Snow for Mother', a mother waits for her little boy to grow up so that she can take him to Alaska to experience the real snow, which he never knew as a little boy in the tropics.