In London the saying goes that you're never more than a few yards away from a rat. In the three decades I've lived here, I've seen just a handful; usually something slipping through the bushes in some suburban park, or once and more memorably, a large great rat hurrying across an empty Gerrard street one early morning.

So that's my experience of this assertion, and it's the way I want to keep it.

With people in the writing business however, and I include myself here, slightly because I do write, but more so because I'm a reader - a serious, heavy duty one - and the two of us need each other, I've found that you're never more than a few sentences away from a "why we write..." statement.

I'd be absolutely disingenuous if I said I did n't read them; I do, I gobble them up, page after page. And I know why. One word: reassurance. Their expressed motivations, have I got them? Have I got the writer's DNA ? What they're saying compels them then is it compelling me ? Am I writing because I feel powerful and blissful in my imagination as one of my writer friends says he does? Is it an impulse that I can't close the door on? Is it bemusement and amazement at this inestimable complex thing called humankind? Or the fun of the unobvious question: just what had that old bath I saw two workmen tugging out of the front door of a Holland Park grandee's house been privy to, for instance.

Why indeed do we write, why indeed do we read?