With English literature, if you do a bit of shonky spelling, no one dies, but if you're half-way through a maths calculation and you stick in an extra zero, everything just crashes into the ravine.

I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.

...and there was nothing to do except to wait and to hurt.

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

Payments to the disabled are getting slashed and people like me are getting a tax cut. Who could possibly think that is a good thing?

Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.

Children simply don't make the distinction; a book is either good or bad. And some of the books they think are good are very, very bad indeed.