My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.
I think I’ve learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven’t shared their experience in some small way.
I think one of the things you have to learn if you’re going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people.
I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I’d never be an astronaut.
I’ve come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can’t describe.
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.
I’ve written 16 children’s books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.
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 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.
I thought Bill Bryson’s ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ was remarkable. Managing to be entertaining while still delivering all that hard science was a pretty good trick to pull off.
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 seventy, it was probably like watching snooker on the telly.
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 from becoming a girl or dying.
It exasperated her sometimes. The way men could be so sure of themselves. They put words together like sheds or shelves and you could stand on them they were so solid. And those feelings which overwhelmed you in the small hours turned to smoke.
You love someone, you’ve got to let something go.
He really did not care whether he survived or not, so long as it rendered him unconscious and absolved him of responsibility.
And then I thought that I had to be like Sherlock Holmes and I had to detach my mind at will to a remarkable degree so that I did not notice how much it was hurting inside my head.
I went to boarding school, and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.
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.
Mother used to say it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being kind and helpful, but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean me.
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 do something completely different, even if there’s a risk of it going wrong.