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...

The most difficult book I wrote was the fourth in a series of linked children’s books. It was like pulling teeth because the publisher wanted exactly the same but completely different. I’d much rather just...

Writing for children is bloody difficult; books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts, and they should therefore be accorded the same respect.

…people who believe in God think God has put human beings on earth because they think human beings are the best animal, but human beings are just an animal and they will evolve into another...

That was the problem, wasn’t it? You left home. But you never did become an adult. Not really. You just fucked up in different and more complicated ways.

No one is ever really a stranger. We cling to the belief that we share nothing with certain people. It’s rubbish. We have almost everything in common with everyone.

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.

But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.

It was true. There really was no limit to the ways in which you could say the wrong thing to your children. You offered an olive branch and it was the wrong olive branch at...

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

If you’re trying to be a successful writer, and you go into a second-hand bookshop, it’s the graveyard of people whose books haven’t been wanted.

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