One of the freedoms you get if you earn a lot of money from a book is to throw away what you want. And if you throw a lot away, the good stuff always comes...

And then a man stood next to the shelf and said, “Come and look at this, Barry. They’ve got, like, a train elf.”And another man came and stood net to him and said, “Well, we...

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I’ve written 16 children’s books and five unpublished novels.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...