I don't want to die, really. I'm interested in what happens next, so I've got to keep on.

I had to wait for a long time before I could support myself with writing. However, being a writer is what I have most wanted to be, from the time I was a child.

At this stage I am not involved with young adults as closely as many other writers. My children are grown up and my grandchildren are still quite young.

My theory is that I decided to be a writer when I was about seven, but of course it is not as simple as that. Like most writers, I had to work at other things to earn a living and wrote mainly in the evenings, often very late at night, for many years.

When you are reading, someone has done a lot of work on your behalf, someone has had ideas and has then written and corrected and improved them so that they can be shared.

Perhaps every time anyone is praised it means that someone else somewhere is going to be ignored

By the time ordinary life asserted itself once more, I would feel I had already lived for a while in some other lifetime, that I had even taken over someone else's life.