Carcharadon carcharias. Six thousandpounds of muscle powering a hoopof butcher’s knives. The only animalthat ate its weaker siblings in the womb.Immune from cancer. Constantly awake.

And what he meant was that maths wasn’t like life because in life there are no straightforward answers in the end

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.

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.

Sometimes we get sad about things and we don’t like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes, we are sad but we really...

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

The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.

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’m worried that I might have left the gas cooker on.

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...

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,...

…companionship refused is worse than loneliness.

Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses. Is there any other period in your life when you hate your best friend on Monday and love them again...

And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery…and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do...

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

I’ve written 16 children’s books and five unpublished novels.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

He said that it was very difficult to become an astronaut. I said that I knew. You had to become an officer in the air force and you had to take lots of orders and...

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.

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 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...

No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary

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...

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...

I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk.

Then he asked if I didn’t like things changing. And I said I wouldn’t mind things changing if I became an astronaut, for example, which is one of the biggest changes you can imagine, apart...

… I will get a First Class Honors degree and I will become a scientist… And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the...

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

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

Lots of things are mysteries. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t an answer to them. It’s just that scientists haven’t found the answer yet.

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.

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...

I am quite amazed how, when people earn lots of money, they think they have to spend it on things that give them access to the club constituted by the people who are in their...

I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them

…because I went to London on my own, and because I went to solved the mystery of Who Killed Wellington? and I found my mother and I was brave and I wrote a book and...

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...

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.

I think she cared more for that bloody dog than for me, for us. And maybe that’s not so stupid, looking back… maybe it is easier living on your own looking after some stupid mutt...

After an Indian meal they went back to Jamie’s flat and Tony did at least two things to him on the sofa that no one had ever done to him before then came back and...

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

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.

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

On the fifth day, which was a Sunday, it rained very hard. I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.

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...

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.

I like poetry when I don’t quite understand why I like it. Poetry isn’t just a question of wrapping something up and giving it to someone else to unwrap. It just doesn’t work like that.

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if...

people believe in God because the world is very complicated and they think it is very unlikely that anything as complicated as a flying squirrel or the human eye or a brain could happen by...

Humour and high seriousness… Perfect bedfellows, I think. Though I usually phrase it in terms of comedy and darkness. Comedy without darkness rapidly becomes trivial. And darkness without comedy rapidly becomes unbearable.

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

In life, you have to take lots of decisions and if you don’t take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do.