"Intellectually flatulent," as I describe it. Going on TV is like a night of heavy drinking where you're not quite sure what you did or said.

So print journalism is not as bad?

They still use the methods of therapy. Some print journalists have done that to me, in fact.

Well, if they were writing a profile of you, that process depends on their digging up or discerning something about you that you might not be aware of, or that you wouldn't want revealed.

That's right. And in order to do that, you have to read all the previous profiles, and you have to get something more than all the other people have got. And the process is almost identical with creating a fictional character, except that there's a real person there. I find that when I do reveal something about myself, it's generally in the context of a discussion of my work anyway. It's a very simple truth -- the way to approach a writer is through what he or she has written. It amuses me in a way that journalists seem to be so totally incapable of grasping what is a very obvious fact.

What was your strangest experience of being profiled?

I was profiled in the New Yorker, by Blake Morrison, who had written a book called "And When Did You Last See Your Father." The death of his father, and his father's personality, was the major thing in Blake's life. And I didn't have a father at all -- no name, no nothing. He was just gobsmacked by that. It was like Mount Everest isn't there in this landscape. So he talked about me almost exclusively in terms of "The Man Who Wasn't There," that little novella about a boy growing up not knowing who his father was. And it was -- I won't say it wasn't a good profile -- but it was at least as much about Blake as it was about me. I thought he was perfectly fair, but he took what was personal to him and produced ... a composite thing, really. It's really what we were talking about, about projecting identities into people rather than seeing and accepting their separate identities.

And at the extreme end of that is your character Danny Miller. Billy Pryor in "Regeneration" brings up a lot of the same questions, about the boundaries of a person's identity -- he too is a master manipulator.

Yes, Pryor has some of the same personality traits as Danny, though Pryor is an awful lot more positive about it. I think Pryor actually has quite a strong sense of his own identity, in spite of all his chameleon qualities and his social manipulativeness.

That's what Danny's missing -- that core identity.

I think what makes Danny dangerous is that he borrows it.

In Danny's case that goes along with physical attractiveness and sexual magnetism. People want to be near him.

Yes, I think it very frequently does. There is a phrase, "borderline charm." And Danny's also intelligent and well educated. In England some people had a lot of trouble with the fact that he was so well educated.

They want their killers to be uneducated.

Yes, they want them to be very lowbrow. In fact he's a bright kid, not from a very deprived home, and he's been given one-to-one tutoring. I mean, my God, they don't have that at Eton! So why wouldn't he be well educated?

The other side of the equation is Tom, who has not enough going on in his own life -- he's still grieving for his father, and he's also got his collapsing marriage and the fact that they haven't been able to produce a child. There's one time when he goes to the door and because his wife has taken away most of the furniture, his footsteps echo and he realizes the sound of his house is completely different now. And it disturbs him. So all of that gives Danny the space he needs to get in.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"