A couple of fun excerpts from this interview:

NG: I’d love to write some porn, but I don’t know if I have the right engines. When I was a young man and I was tempted to write porn, imaginary parents would appear over my shoulder and read what I was writing; just about the point that I managed to banish the imaginary parents, real children would lean over my shoulder and read what I was writing. Being English, the one pornographic story I that have written—called “Tastings” in Smoke and Mirrors, the story collection before this—was deeply embarrassing. It took about four years to write: I would write a page, stop, exit that document with my ears burning and my face red, and then it would be six or eight months before I’d go back and write another page. There’s also a little bit of sex in a story called “How Do You Think It Feels Up There?” But I love the idea of writing sex, and I think Alan found a really good model in Victorian porn. There was a period when I was reviewing porn as a book reviewer—I was reviewing everything, but porn was one of the things I was reviewing—and Victorian porn was far and away my favorite. You knew that if a book was written by Anonymous and had a title like “The Oyster” it was going to be fun, because Victorian pornography was just cooler. There was so much societal repression and yet the porn was fun and and kinky in all sorts of really odd and interesting ways.

EL: You talked earlier about going down to the garden to write, and I know you write a lot while you travel. Can you write anywhere?

NG: Yes. But it’s easier to write somewhere where there isn’t much of an Internet.