I think if you ask what the qualities of a writer are, you have to be born extremely observant. That is really the beginning of it. Because as Graham Greene notably said — when people asked, “Are your characters based on people?” — the answer is no, if you’re a real writer, unless you choose a particular individual. You choose Napoleon and then you write a novel about his love life, you know, then you recreate it. But in general, what Greene said, and that I think is absolutely true, and I found in my own life, he said, “You are sitting in a bus or in a queue, you are waiting to go in at the dentist and there are people there.” First of all, you have to have big ears. You eavesdrop. You catch a word here and there. You see that there’s a quarrel brewing perhaps, in the restaurant, and a love affair brewing somewhere else, and a case where one dominates another. You see these people and you read their body language and you create alternative lives for them.