I’ve always really enjoyed writing different things because I get bored very easily.

All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I’m not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are.

I am atheist in a very religious mould. I’m always asking myself the big questions. Where did we come from? Is there a meaning to all of this? When I find myself in church, I...

Things can be funny when people are uneasy. It softens them up and stops them falling asleep on the sofa. I like those moments where people half-smile and half-wince.

I’m really lucky in that I can do lots of different things. It must be really hard to just be a poet or just be a novelist – a constant cycle of effort and exhaustion...

Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea...

And all I could see would be stars. And stars are the places where the molecules that life is made of were constructed billions of years ago. For example, all the iron in your blood...

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.

I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there’s a story there.

I want my name to mean me.

And it’s best if you know a good thing is going to happen, like an eclipse or getting a microscope for Christmas. And it’s bad if you know a bad thing is going to happen,...

Most adults, unlike most children, understand the difference between a book that will hold them spellbound for a rainy Sunday afternoon and a book that will put them in touch with a part of themselves...

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’ve come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can’t describe.

And Father said, “Christopher, do you understand that I love you?”And I said “Yes,” because loving someone is helping them when they get into trouble, and looking after them, and telling them the truth, and...

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...

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.

It took me a long time to come out as someone who doesn’t like film. It’s a bit like when people say they don’t like books: you get that sharp intake of breath.

MiaowConsider me.I sit here like Tiberius,inscrutable and grand.I will let “I dare not”wait upon “I would”and bear the twanglingof your small guitarbecause you are my owland foster me with milk.Why wet my paw?Just keep me...

Lots of people wrote to the magazine to say that Marilyn vos Savant was wrong, even when she explained very carefully why she was right. Of the letters she got about the problem, 92% said...

There’s something rather wonderful about the fact that Oxford is a very small city that contains most of the cultural and metropolitan facilities you could want, in terms of bookshops, theatre, cinema, conversation. But it’s...

I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.

Also I didn’t habe 20/20 vision whch you needed to be a pilot. But I said you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.

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.

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.

Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.

People say that you always have to tell the truth. But they do not mean this because you are not allowed to tell old people that they are old and you are not allowed to...

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

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...

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.

A Rough GuideBe polite at the reception desk.Not all the knives are in the museum.The waitresses know that a nice boyis formed in the same way as a deckchair.Pay for the beer and send flowers.Introduce...

And intuition is what people is what people use in life to make decisions.But logic can help you work out the right answer.

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.

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