There are always people who are desperate to put you in your one camp and never let you leave. The idea that you could be interested in the Yazidi community and also in lipstick blows people's minds. It's a really short-sighted, Stone Age attitude; it's boring, actually.

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.

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.

I cannot say who, precisely, came up with the idea of a Stone Age family.

A whole bunch of months passed and I didn't hear anything and then he emailed and asked if I could do a little piece on POD and Queens of the Stone Age.

Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.

We didn't leave the Stone Age because we ran out of rocks. We found a better way of doing things.

Marriage has been in a constant state of evolution since the dawn of the Stone Age. In the process, it has become more flexible - but also more optional.

To experience the northern forest in the raw, I went to northern Finland and Lapland, travelling on horseback, and sleeping on reindeer skins in the traditional open-fronted Finnish laavu. I ate elk heart, reindeer and lingonberries, and tried out spruce resin: the chewing gum of the Stone Age.

Before there were any sort of 'recordings' there was performance. If we are devolved back to the Stone Age tomorrow, there will be performance.

I wouldn't mind working with Queens of the Stone Age, doing some guitar stuff on that. Even Arctic Monkeys. I'd like to do be a bit of guitar with them guys. I'll play on anyone's record to be honest with you.

The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.

I'm often asked where my nickname 'Kun' comes from. My parents says it was a Japanese cartoon I used to watch on television when I was very young, set in the Stone Age, where the main character was a boy called Kum Kum, the little caveman.

Leadership and punching above your weight doesn't necessarily always have to mean gunboat diplomacy and bombing other countries into the stone age. It can actually mean leading by example, and helping other countries.

My novel 'Wolf Brother' is set in northern Scandinavia during the late Stone Age, so I was aware from the start of Norse influences. I used some Norse names, and the soul-eater Thiazzi is based on the Norse storm giant, Thiassi.

Why do so many children love the idea of being snowed in or shipwrecked, of having to survive on one's own? When I was a child, I was no exception. I wanted to hunt with a bow and arrow like the Stone Age people: to skin deer and build my own shelter. And I desperately wanted a wolf. As we lived in London, my options were limited.

I look at my career as a body of work, not just Queens of the Stone Age records. I'm in Eagles of Death Metal, I'm in Them Crooked Vultures; I make records with other people.

If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.

The expression of this idea is Queens of the Stone Age, but the idea is that you will never slack on the music and will always humble yourself at the alter of Rock.

Human brains - in terms of cognition and emotion and consciousness - are essentially the same as they were at the time of Shakespeare or Jesus or Cleopatra or the Stone Age. They are not evolving with the pace of change.