Today people can see and protest all the different interests that want war to happen, the people it financially benefits. The First World War wasn't fought for that reason. The Second World War wasn't fought for that reason. Your entire country and way of life could be overtaken.

I was a very quiet child, quite introverted, really. Independent, yes; I didn't need a lot of supervision. Less so than I did when I got older, maybe. But I was a bookish child, not surprisingly. I could sit quite happily in a corner for hours and entertain myself with books.

Bruno: We're not supposed to be friends, you and me. We're meant to be enemies. Did you know that?

Children's book writers tend to feel quite superior, and adult writers tend to feel they wouldn't know how to write a children's book - which might surprise you because I think a lot of people think it's the other way around.

Just because a man glances up at the sky at night does not make him an astronomer, you know.

It is possible, you know, to drift off to an unknown world and find happiness there. Maybe even more happiness than you've ever known before.

I don't change the language for children books. I don't make the language simpler. I use words that they might have to look up in the dictionary. The books are shorter, but there's just not that much difference other than that to be honest. And the funny thing is, I have adult writer friends [to whom I would say], "Would you think of writing a children's book?" and they go, "No, God, I wouldn't know how." They're quite intimidated by the concept of it. And when I say to children's books writers, would they write an adult book, they say no because they think they're too good for it.