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I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels.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.

With English literature, if you do a bit of shonky spelling, no one dies, but if you're half-way through a maths calculation and you stick in an extra zero, everything just crashes into the ravine.

As a teenager, I was always this strange mixture of kind of vice-captain of the rugby team and sensitive artist type the rest of the time. I was sent away to this public school in the middle of nowhere, and I think we managed to completely miss out on normal youth culture.

When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.

I am really interested in eccentric minds. It's rather like being fascinated by how cars work. It's really boring if your car works all the time. But as soon as something happens, you get the bonnet up. If someone has an abnormal or dysfunctional state of mind, you get the bonnet up.

I like having my back pressed against a wall and being made to work harder so I don't embarrass myself.

Obviously I have a capacity for feeling extreme anxiety, and there are people out there who don't. I'm to some extent rather jealous of them.

My best days do seem like a distillation of all that was best about school. Write a story! Paint a picture! Write a poem! Make a print!

I'm really interested in the extraordinary found in the normal. Hopefully, my books don't take you to an entirely different place but make you look at things around you.