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

Books aren't like broccoli. You don't have to eat it because it's good for you. Books drag you in because they are fascinating.

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.

I'm very close to my parents. I admire them and respect them enormously. But my childhood unfortunately coincided with the end of their marriage. They are two people who should never, ever have got married.

I think I have probably adjusted the way I see the world, I interpret the world and I communicate the world into book format simply because of this familiarity. Possibly in another society and another context I might have been a storyteller or who knows what.

A lot of dyslexic kids are actually more intelligent than average and are very good, because they've got very good memories, at disguising the fact that they can't read or have got problems in reading and literacy.

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.