Thank you very much for your stimulating questions. We must do this again some time, but with beer.

It's a kind of bedspread. Who'd have thought?

I invented the beer belly.

Yes, a revision really would be a good idea. The problem for me is finding time to do it and also stuff just happens so quickly that any revision would grow out of date practically before the ink was dry. But it is something that I have seriously thought about do very much want to return to at some point in the fairly near future.

Actually they all feel like work because they are work. But the one that was easiest and most enjoyable was The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. That was a book about me growing up in Iowa in the 1950s and it didn't require much research because I was just telling my life story. I really enjoyed doing that book.

I would say my favourite word is any word that's correctly punctuated.

I have actually just come across an amazing fact which I discovered too late to put in my book but it was simply this: if you imagined a cubic container three miles across on each side - and just try to imagine how massive that would be - and you filled it right to the very top with oil. That's how much fossil fuel we burn on earth every single year. And at the rate we're going, in less than 50 years, that cube will be nine miles across on each side. I thought that was pretty amazing.

No I haven't. And that's at least partly because I do take some care to disguise them if there's a risk that they would be embarrassed or upset by what I've written about them. Mary Ellen, who was this extremely annoying young woman who hiked with us for a couple of days on the AT, really did exist and really was pretty much as I portrayed her in the book. But I did at least give her a pseudonym and didn't describe her in any way that would make her identifiable. I was also pretty confident that she was not the sort of person who reads books. Anyway, I've never heard from her.

Several people that I've written about in a neutral or friendly way and whose actual names I have used in my books have got in touch later and I am still in contact with some of them - there was for instance a father and son from Chattanooga with whom we shared a shelter during a snowstorm and they wrote to me later and we corresponded for a while.

Thank you! I really am like that with money. I can't help myself but I just hate being screwed. Even when I'm travelling at someone else's expense it bothers me to see what it being charged to publishers for instance for things like the contents of minibars. So even when money isn't coming out of my own pocket I still tend to be parsimonious. When it is coming out of my own pocket I am spectacularly parsimonious. Drives my family crazy.

I did go to China very briefly a couple of years ago to Shanghai, and loved it. China is obviously just about the most important and fascinating country on earth, but I don't think I will ever do a book about China. Partly it's because it would represent too much of a time commitment to go there and also I'm not comfortable writing about cultures and societies that I don't really understand. I'm much happier dealing with English-speaking people because I feel that I either understand them from experience or can easily get to understand them through conversation.

Thank you, I'm so glad you like the book. The genesis of that was that an American publisher did a series of half length biographies (40,000 words each) on famous people and asked me if I would take on Shakespeare. So it wasn't a full-fledged biography which I think I would have found too daunting. I really did enjoy the experience but I don't have any plans at the moment to try anything like that again. If I were going to do a biography, the person who appeals to me is George Washington, but doing the research for that would mean spending at least a couple of years in Virginia for practical reasons - that's not something I'd like to do at my time of life.

Washington has always fascinated me - he was a member of an extremely privileged, comfortable class of people and if America's campaign for independence had failed he would have been the first person executed. So the amount of peril he faced in furtherance of a political belief was quite remarkable. And on top of all that I just think he's a fascinatingly ambiguous but extraordinarily decent person.

I'm really glad to hear you mention Centralia - we should perhaps explain for those who have never heard of it, that it's a town in Pennsylvania that was built on top of a coal seam and the coal seam caught fire many years ago and so the whole town was slowly consumed by an underground fire. And eventually had to be abandoned. It was one of the most surreal and strangely moving places I've ever been. I would love to know what it's like now nearly 20 years since I last saw it. As for your other questions, yes, I felt an acute sense of failure when I realised I wasn't going to walk the AT from end to end and was quite disconsolate for a couple of days. But then Katz and I realised that we were still enjoying walking. We just didn't want to do every inch of the trail, it was more than we could handle. You cannot imagine just how far 2200 miles is on foot until it's your feet that are experiencing it. So we decided we would walk as much of it as we pleasurably could, and in the end, we managed to cover about 850 miles, which is equivalent to walking from New York to Chicago in a single summer. So it was a pretty good summer's hike. But I do wish I could say I managed to do the whole thing from end to end.

Where did that question come from? I quite like the idea of an armpit that dispenses things but out of all the possible substances on Earth, I can't say that suncream would make my shortlist. Could it be money instead?