I think good books have to make a few people angry.
Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new.
I find people confusing.
Usually people look at you when they’re talking to you. I know that they’re working out what I’m thinking, but I can’t tell what they’re thinking. It is like being in a room with a one-way mirror in a spy film.
I do not tell lies. Mother used to say that this was because I was a good person. But it is not because I am a good person. It is because I do not tell lie.
But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.
The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.
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.
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.
Things can be funny when people are uneasy. It softens them up and stops them falling asleep on the sofa. I like those moments where people half-smile and half-wince.
Madness doesn’t happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone.
You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real.
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.
Jane Austen writes about these humdrum lives with such empathy that they seem endlessly fascinating.
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 it much, much more moving than something on film.
There was a time in my life when I was going in and out of houses that were extraordinarily different – from a working-class terrace in Northampton to the homes of friends who were really very wealthy. It was quite an odd position to be in, I realise looking back, and quite a nice one.
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.
When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.
Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.
How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again.