Find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

As a teenager, I was always this strange mixture of kind of vice-captain of the rugby team and sensitive artist type the rest of the time. I was sent away to this public school in the middle of nowhere, and I think we managed to completely miss out on normal youth culture.

I've worked in television long enough to know that when you stop enjoying that type of thing you go home and do something else.

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

Find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that Father calls groaning. I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world. It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear and you tune it halfway between two stations so that all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is all can hear and then you know you are safe because you cannot hear anything else

...and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything