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.
But I don’t feel sad about it. Because Mother is dead. And because Mr. Shears isn’t around anymore. So I would be feeling sad about something that isn’t real and doesn’t exist. And that would be stupid.
You could ask for hugs if you were feeling sad or you’d hurt yourself, but when it happened spontaneously it made you feel warm inside.
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.
And what he meant was that maths wasn’t like life because in life there are no straightforward answers in the end.
I could invent another world. I’m not terribly keen on this one.
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.
Payments to the disabled are getting slashed and people like me are getting a tax cut. Who could possibly think that is a good thing?
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
Show me the artist anywhere who’s had an utterly stable mental life, and I’ll buy you hot dinners for the rest of your life.
The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.
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.