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.

What actually happens when you die is that your brain stops working and your body rots, like Rabbit did when he died and we buried him in the earth at the bottom of the garden....

I really like the idea of being a bit unpredictable. I’m known for being a nice, easy-going person with a straightforward exterior. So I think a bit of me wants to be sort of sly...

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

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

Una mentira es cuando dices que ha pasado algo que no ha pasado. Pero siempre es una sola cosa la que pasa en un momento determinado y en un sitio determinado. Y hay un número...

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

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.

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.

And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don’t even exist anymore because their...

La gente habla mucho sin utilizar ninguna palabra.

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...

B is for bestseller.

But in life you have to take lots of deductions 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.So it...

And that is why a dog can go to the vet and have a really big operation and have metal pins sticking out of its leg but if it sees a cat it forgets that...

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.

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

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

A white lie is not a lie at all. It is where you tell the truth but you do not tell all of the truth. This means that everything you say is a white lie...

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

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.

Stories about mental aberration and oddity only make sense in context. Just how do people live with someone who is peculiar, gifted, strange or alien? It’s odd because there’s a little part of me that...

I think people believe in heaven because they don’t like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don’t like the idea that other people will move into their house...

At twenty life was like wrestling an octopus. Every moment mattered. At thirty it was a walk in the country. Most of the time your mind was somewhere else. By the time you got to...

I suffer depression only in the sense that I am a writer. We don’t have proper jobs to go to. We are on our own all day. Show me a writer who doesn’t get depressed:...

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

Because time is not like space. And when you put something down somewhere, like a protractor or a biscuit, you can have a map in your head to tell you where you have left it,...

I find people confusing.

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

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

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...

A lot of roles for people with disabilities are quite patronising. It’s a real pity when they are just used to give dull PC kudos to a drama, or when they’re wheeled on in a...