Dance, my darling dance! If you dance then death can't catch you! Nothing bad can touch you! Dance!

Morning: Slept. Afternoon: Slept. Evening: Ate grass. Night: Ate grass. Decided grass is boring. Scratched. Hard to reach the itchy bits. Slept.

Often the true hero and heroines of my books are the houses, the places, the communities where people find a home.

I'd love to see a new form of social security ... everyone taught how to grow their own; fruit and nut trees planted along every street, parks planted out to edibles, every high rise with a roof garden, every school with at least one fruit tree for every kid enrolled.

One of my extraordinary regrets about my death is not so much that it's going to happen but simply that I'll never know what happens next.

The song and dance didn't stop us dying. It just stopped the fear of death swallowing us up while we were still alive.

There is still in many schools complete misapprehension that children with reading difficulties are stupid. It is so easy to teach a child that they're dumb. There needs to be a recognition that you need different ways to teach children who have got reading problems.