I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a roller coaster ride.

Writing for children is bloody difficult; books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts, and they should therefore be accorded the same respect.

I’ve worked in television long enough to know that when you stop enjoying that type of thing you go home and do something else.

Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we’ve seen too many of her books on screen.

I think most writers feel like they’re on the outside looking in much of the time. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.

If you enjoy math and you write novels, it’s very rare that you’ll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance.

Bore children, and they stop reading. There’s no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.

Many children’s writers don’t have children of their own.

Children simply don’t make the distinction; a book is either good or bad. And some of the books they think are good are very, very bad indeed.

Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.

Every life is narrow. Our only escape is not to run away, but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves.

If one book’s done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There’s that horror of the second novel that doesn’t match up.

When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. It needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.

No one wants to know how clever you are. They don’t want an insight into your mind, thrilling as it might be. They want an insight into their own.

For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people.

I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.

The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else’s shoes. The reader’s shoes. You’ve got to entertain them.

Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it’s going to make them a better person.

That’s important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there’s a story there.

Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.

Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.

I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I’d never be an astronaut.

I don’t mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.

At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.

B is for bestseller.

Use your imagination, and you’ll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.

From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.

I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they’d be easier.

I’ve written 16 children’s books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

I don’t remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.

There’s something with the physical size of America… American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.

I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a roller coaster ride.

If kids like a picture book, they’re going to read it at least 50 times. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed.

Most adults, unlike most children, understand the difference between a book that will hold them spellbound for a rainy Sunday afternoon and a book that will put them in touch with a part of themselves they didn’t even know existed.

My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.

I am atheist in a very religious mould. I’m always asking myself the big questions. Where did we come from? Is there a meaning to all of this? When I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them.

As a kid, I didn’t read a great deal of fiction, and I’ve forgotten most of what I did read.