Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
While studying art and design at Central Saint Martins, I went round supermarkets taking photos of shoppers and their baskets: the game was to match people with their food. For an architectural project, I made a scale model of a shop out of gingerbread rather than foam and added icing and sweets very colourfully.
When I was living on my own, for a footballer it's easy to do the things that you're not supposed to, or not what the sport science team says. For example, if there's a packet of crisps, you're going to eat them. The same with a packet of sweets. Go to bed at a certain time? You're not going to if you're on your own.
When I started writing, the deal was that publishers gave you a grand or two as an advance to buy some sweets, with the promise that they would make a big putsch with your fourth book when you'd built up a bit of a following. But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing.
I'm really still a child of the Forties. I still think about it a lot, about the repercussions of armed conflict. Until 1953 we had rationing. We couldn't buy meat, we couldn't buy pleasurable goods like cigarettes and sweets. I didn't starve - my family were lucky - but I knew what it was like standing in line waiting for foodstuffs.
I work out like a maniac, three times more than anything I did in the past. I am off carbs, salt, sweets, and live on a fish diet. And I promise I am not going to indulge in food again. See, when I was 49 years old, I was fine, but the moment I touched 50, I felt that something within me had changed drastically. My metabolic rate dropped.
It's not about being thin, it's about being healthy. And when you are a child you like to eat all these unhealthy things like chocolate and sweets. Oh my God. I love strawberries dipped in chocolate and Lion bars and Toffee Crisps - and as you grow up, you have to learn that those things are only good in moderation or you will become very fat.
