Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune, because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.

I think one of the things you have to learn if you're going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people.

It took me a long time to come out as someone who doesn't like film. It's a bit like when people say they don't like books: you get that sharp intake of breath.

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.

As to the number of novels I've abandoned... I shudder to think. I have thrown away five completed novels, and that's a gruesome enough figure. But not necessarily a waste of effort.

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.

I went to boarding school, and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.

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.

Indeed, I am repeatedly astonished by the number of really good writers who understand human beings so well on paper but don't know how to deal with them in real life.

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

Madness doesn't happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone.

I'm a writer! If you work in an office, it dampens you. It makes you fit a routine. The effect of being a writer is not dissimilar to being long-term unemployed. And everyone knows that is not good for you.

I thought Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' was remarkable. Managing to be entertaining while still delivering all that hard science was a pretty good trick to pull off.

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

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.

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 you came from Mars and tried to analyse British or American society through novels, you'd think our society was preponderantly full of middle-aged, slightly alcoholic, middle-class, intellectual men, most of whom are divorced from their families and have nothing to do with children.

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

B is for bestseller.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.

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

You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real.

What I love about the theatre is that it's always metaphorical. It's like going back to being a kid again, and we're all pretending in a room. Sometimes, when the pretending really works, I find it much, much more moving than something on film.

The main impetus for being a writer is thinking, 'I could invent another world. I'm not terribly keen on this one.'

I've always really enjoyed writing different things because I get bored very easily.

The most difficult book I wrote was the fourth in a series of linked children's books. It was like pulling teeth because the publisher wanted exactly the same but completely different. I'd much rather just do something completely different, even if there's a risk of it going wrong.

If you're trying to be a successful writer, and you go into a second-hand bookshop, it's the graveyard of people whose books haven't been wanted.

I think good books have to make a few people angry.

I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.

There was a time in my life when I was going in and out of houses that were extraordinarily different - from a working-class terrace in Northampton to the homes of friends who were really very wealthy. It was quite an odd position to be in, I realise looking back, and quite a nice one.

Show me the artist anywhere who's had an utterly stable mental life, and I'll buy you hot dinners for the rest of your life.

I think Britain has this tradition which suggests that if you make the readers laugh too much, you can't really be serious. Whereas, I think one of the functions laughter can perform in a book, as in life, is that it's a reaction to genuine horror.

I always thought I'd eventually learn how to draw really well, and despite constant evidence to the contrary, I just kept on trying. If you're too good at anything, you don't have to think about the process, whereas I feel like I spend my life with my head under the bonnet, trying to understand how everything works.

I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.