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

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

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.

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

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.

B is for bestseller.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.