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.

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.