I’ve known ambitious people with no aptitude for the thing they did. Most of whom, rather terrifyingly, tended to succeed.
I’ve never known anyone who was what he or she seemed; or at least, was only what he or she seemed. People carry worlds within them.
It’s a wonderful thing, as a writer, to be given parameters and walls and barriers.
Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn’t.
My stuff gets published in some countries as fiction and in some countries as fantasy. It’s just where they think it will do best in the bookshops.
Partly because I get such astonishingly nice fans.
The biggest difference between England and America is that England has history, while America has geography.
The great thing about Batman and Superman, in truth, is that they are literally transcendent. They are better than most of the stories they are in.
The only people I ever get irritated with are the ones who announce, using my Twitter handle, that they are no longer following me and why.
The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity.
I don’t know if proud is the right word, but I am somebody who does not, on the whole, have the highest regard for my own stuff in that when I look all I get to see are the flaws.
Like some kind of particularly tenacious vampire the short story refuses to die, and seems at this point in time to be a wonderful length for our generation.
I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don’t understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in.
The short story is still like the novel’s wayward younger brother, we know that it’s not respectable – but I think that can also add to the glory of it.
A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It’s a community space. It’s a place of safety, a haven from the world.
When I started out, there were a lot of things I knew I couldn’t do, and a lot of things I only found out I couldn’t do by going and doing it. And no-one was watching, and nobody cared.
When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning.
And if there’s a moral there, I don’t know what it is, save maybe that we should take our goodbyes whenever we can.
He couldn’t see why people made such a fuss about people eating their silly old fruit anyway, but life would be a lot less fun if they didn’t. And there was never an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.
It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the beds we wake up in in the morning, and it is astonishing how fragile that can be.