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 edit the hymns as I sing them.

If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed.

For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people.

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.

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 mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.

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

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

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.

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.

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 they didn't even know existed.

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.

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

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.

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 had to be comfortable.

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 a roller coaster ride.

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 out and hope that no one runs away.

Many children's writers don't have children of their own.

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

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

That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.

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

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

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

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.

There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.

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 edit the hymns as I sing them.

My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.

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.

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.

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

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

B is for bestseller.

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.

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

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.

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 tokenistic way without any real involvement in the plot.

Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.

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 the middle of nowhere, and I think we managed to completely miss out on normal youth culture.

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.

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 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 the process, whereas I feel like I spend my life with my head under the bonnet, trying to understand how everything works.

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 bonnet up. If someone has an abnormal or dysfunctional state of mind, you get the bonnet up.

I have very fond memories of swimming in Walden Pond when we lived in Boston. You'd swim past a log and see all these turtles sunning themselves. Slightly disturbing if you thought about how many more were swimming around your toes, but also rather wonderful.

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.

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 and devious.

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: who has a completely stable mood. They'd be a garage mechanic or something.