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.
Bore children, and they stop reading. There’s no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.
As a kid, I didn’t read a great deal of fiction, and I’ve forgotten most of what I did read.
Most murders are committed by someone who is known to the victim. In fact, you are most likely to be murdered by a member of your own family on Christmas day.
Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.
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.
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.
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.
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 knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there’s a story there.
I like having my back pressed against a wall and being made to work harder so I don’t embarrass myself.
And because there is something they can’t see people think it has to be special, because people always think there is something special about what they can’t see, like the dark side of the moon, or the other side of a black hole, or in the dark when they wake up at night and they’re scared.
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.
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.
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.
But 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. So it is good to have a reason why you hate some things and you like others.
I do not like strangers because I do not like people I have never met before. They are hard to understand.
I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.
From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.
Eventually scientists will discover something that explains ghosts, just like they discovered electricity, which explained lightning, and it might be something about people’s brains, or something about the earth’s magnetic field, or it might be some new force altogether. And then ghosts won’t be mysteries. They will be like electricity and rainbows and nonstick frying pans.