I don't think any potential writer ever knows what sort of writer he is going to be. We see ourselves ten times a day in mirrors and shop-windows, but we always carry an image of ourselves very different from the reflected reality. I see myself as a creature of gloom and sobriety, but my books reflect a sort of clown. And yet I believe that if I had written my first novel out of the experience of my early days in Lancashire, with the sense of exile, the taunts of 'cat-lick' and 'proddy-dog' *, I should not have been a comic writer at all. There was something in Gibraltar which drew out a sleeping comic talent, and that something was the confluence of cultures. Now, in the work of fiction, conflict is everything, but the aim of the work is to resolve the conflict through imagination. When the resolution of cultural, religious, racial conflict –– in real life as opposed to fiction –– is achieved through gentle colonialism, then fiction, as opposed to real life, can separate out the elements and allow them to touch in tiny electric shocks which tickle the imagination. I learned from Gibraltar that I would be happiest when writing about fantastically varied communities on which an alien but benign rule had been imposed. I found such communities in Africa, in Malaya and, strangely enough, in Russia, but Gibraltar was the prototype.
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