The reason most of the children are having problems in any inner-city neighborhood is because they don't see enough positive role models in their own environment.

Perhaps trying to move away from my problems and focus on the positive is the best I can do.

I think sometimes in life we want to ignore the problems of society and just think about the good. I believe in positive thinking and affirmative living I also think it's really important to remember all of our disenfranchised members of society.

With everything that's thrown at you whether it be problems at home problems at work - whatever - basically if you remain positive you can see your way out of that.

I think people in Botswana are pleased that my books paint a positive picture of their lives and portray the country as being very special. They've made a great success of their country and the people are fed up with the constant reporting of only the problems and poverty of the continent. They welcome something which puts the positive side.

When children are very young you read them books that are positive to help them go to sleep. But there comes a moment when they begin to understand the difficulties of the world. They know there are problems and the books they read should reflect that not gloss over them.

But you see our society is still trapped in this binary black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example.

People meet in bars after work all over the world and talk about the great problems of life and death and the world and politics and they don't take themselves seriously. They can do nothing else except chat about these things in bars after work.

It's true that it's within the realm of cultural politics that young people tend to work through political issues which I think is good although it's not going to solve the problems.

London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble we had severe energy problems we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who started a bombing campaign in English cities politics were fantastically polarized between left and right.