I think true wilderness can still be found, but it's hard to reach and dangerous when you get there, which is probably why it still exists.
It's the little details I love. How to fletch your arrows with owl feathers, because owls fly silently, so maybe your arrows will, too. How to carry fire in a piece of smouldering fungus wrapped in birchbark. These are the things which help a world come alive.
My thirties merged into my forties, and I sort of gradually realised that I don't really want children. Now I'm glad I don't have them. Part of that is because I have my books.
Doing field trips rather than simply researching online allows me to experience the story from the point of view of my main character; you can't get that by sitting at a desk.
I actually carry a little picture of a wolf in my wallet, rather like people carry a picture of their kids. The reason I do that is to remind myself why I'm doing this, to remind myself of the story.
I didn't do it for the money. I know a lot of people say that, but if I'd wanted to be rich, I'd have stayed working as a city lawyer. I gave that up eight years ago and took a massive drop in salary, and I didn't mind because I was doing what I loved. There's plenty of material for the other five books.
I didn't wake up one day and think, 'I'm not going to have children.' My mother was a housewife and brought up three children, so I just thought it would happen.
I saw myself as a trailblazer in the 1980s as a female lawyer in the City. It was exciting, as women were outnumbered by men five to one. But while I had this sense of trailblazing, in reality, I wasn't pushing boundaries; it was just a personal myth I'd created, as I was doing a job I wasn't enjoying.
I hate it when you see in films people with their anoraks flapping open in a blizzard. They'd be dead in a couple of minutes. It's got to be real. It's got to work.
I'm quite happy trekking around Greenland on my own, but those big book tours in America or the Far East are the only time I ever really feel lonely.
For a novelist, the great thing about the Stone Age people is that we know virtually nothing about their beliefs - which means that I get to make it up! But it's still got to be plausible.
At university - when I was supposed to be studying biochemistry - I had tried to write a children's book about a boy and a wolf cub, and there was a paragraph in that which was from the wolf's point of view.
I wanted to write a very simple story about a boy, a wolf, a girl, a bear and a forest, so I thought I might set it in the past. I didn't realise that it went back to when I was 10: I used to love the Stone Age when I was a kid and wanted to live in it, and I got rid of my bed and slept on the floor, but I didn't remember it.
It's true to say that once I've got the bare bones of a story, I often get ideas from my own research trips to faraway places.
I'm not the next J. K. Rowling. We've got one already. It's flattering to be compared to her. I like her books and loved the first three particularly, but apart from the fact that they've got young boys as heroes, they're very different.